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Need a creative way to boot SCSI drive

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First post, by gbeirn

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Somewhere along my travels I acquired a combo VGA/ SCSI PCI card. I think I pulled it from an old Mac. It's a ATi Rage 3D Pro and Adaptec ultra wide SCSI card. I'll try to get pictures up. I was wanting to use this in my Pentium Pro build. The card has a VGA BIOS and posts fine and displays a signal. The SCSI part works fine too, it detects my 9GB quantum drive fine in Windows 2000 setup. What if lacks however is an option ROM for the SCSI part so there is no way to boot from the card.

There as an empty socket on the card for what I would presume would be the SCSI option ROM but it's a rather rare or obscure card from my googleing.

I do have a 256MB IDE DOM at my disposal too. Has anyone ever setup a small boot partition on one drive and had the OS on the other? Can grub or another bootloader accomplish this? I want to use Windows 2000.

Thanks!

Edit: it this card here: http://www.techexcess.net/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=97512-1

Reply 1 of 1, by Rawrl

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That's pretty similar to what those old Win95/98 boot floppies did - load a bunch of drivers for various SCSI chips and a CD-ROM driver, then start the installer off of the newly-functioning disc. You could try to hack something together like that, but it'd be pretty ugly. A quick Google brings up this page, which might help.

The problem is, boot managers and operating systems rely on int13h BIOS calls to access the disk before any drivers load, and the SCSI BIOS hooks into that. No BIOS, no int13h.

From the page you linked, it looks like the SCSI chip is an AIC-7880, which is the same chip on the Adaptec AHA-2940uw card. You could try writing the 2940 ROM to an appropriate chip (it's a PLCC32, right?) and see where that takes you.
It's difficult to make out, but this guy had the same card as you and it sounds like it was detected and configured by the BIOS on another card? Might be worth a shot, anyway.

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