Wonder why - prevent workers from listening to music on company equipment?

Maybe 🤣. I popped it off the front of my cdr, from back side just tapped it with a screwdriver in the slot and on the peg.
BTW: The Adaptec BIOS version on my board is 1.24 which only supports up to 8.4Gb drive size. Have tried a few BIOS editors to see if I can replace it with 1.34 which support to 127Gb but no luck yet.

Alright. I'll try to pop mine off as well. The cover isn't very visually appealing.

Bummer on the 8 GB HDD limit. Is the Adaptec BIOS in that Intel 4 mbit eeprom, or elsewhere on the board? Did you update the motherboard's BIOS already?

Yes the Adaptec BIOS's (both the UW and Narrow, they are seperate) are both in the Intel flash chip along with system BIOS and the onboard video BIOS. Flashed board with latest x.14 from the x.08 it had and it did not update the scsi bios's. If I can find a proper Phoenix tool can swap the UW 7880p bios with a newer one. Did that on a Asus board once but it had Award BIOS and those are very easy to mod compared to Phoenix....

Oh, this is quite unfortunate. So we need to disassemble the binary, patch, and reassemble? You found the SCSI BIOS v1.34 from the Adaptec website? Anyway to force the Adaptec flash utility to update an OEM BIOS [with success]?

Yes need to patch. Because the main BIOS contains 4 total BIOS it cannot be just flashed with the Adaptec flasher or else could over-write the boot block which would render the board dead and no chance to do any bios recovery w/o unsoldering and force flash thru a eeprom programmer. I am going to see if any of the jumpers disable the onboard scsi. Some of those labeled as "required" may disable differant BIOS parts which could prove to be useful...

Popped the cover off my CD-ROM drive. Looks a lot better now.

Added CD-ROM audio cable. Unique 3-pin configuration, but common for this drive. I noticed a horizontal jumper on the CD-ROM. Any idea what this is for?

Do you guys find the front case fan has this irritating hum to it, as if the bearings are pitted? Or is it just my fan? Thanks.

horizontal jumper is probably just a spare, that's a common way of including extras - spanning the two ground pins

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-01-08, 21:50:

horizontal jumper is probably just a spare, that's a common way of including extras - spanning the two ground pins

Agree !! Have seen that on many HD's and cdroms.

Yes my front case fan is somewhat noisy, am going to try and lube it or replace it. Noticed that there is a spce for second front fan under the included one.

Seems to me like a bad idea to place spare jumpers in a horizontal position; someone may mistakenly place it across the signal pins rather than GND, especially if you don't know what you're doing, or know what are doing, but are tired, or are holding the drive upside down [while tired].

I'll probably try to lube mine as well, but I have the feeling it is destined for replacement. The "nan, nan, nan, nan, nan, nan..." sound is at such a volume that even if lube cuts down 50-75% of the noise it will still be too noisy for me.

Was a common thing with the jumpers to see spares horizontal across unused GND pins - I'm looking at one right now, the later XM-6401B from 1999 done exactly the same. If you only used a single pin on the top row they invariably got knocked off and lost

https://web.archive.org/web/20000304074903/ht … 6401setup.shtml

I have also updated to BIOS version 1.00.14 WL014. Does anyone know what this revision updated? I had hoped that it would let me hit ESC on memory count to speed it up, but it did not. Does anyone know how to speed up or skip the memory test on this system? My system has 128 MB and the wait is at about the max I think I can tolerate. I cannot imagine the delay when using 512 MB.

I've determined that the system insists on having memory with a parity. Perhaps one of the jumpers on the board is forcing this requirement? Single or double-sided are fine as long as it has parity.

The onboard SCSI appears to be Ultra Wide, so up to 40 MB/s. I tried using an Ultra160 SCSI cable, but the HDD wasn't recognised. The SCSI cable that comes with the system does not have a terminator and my Ultra160 SCSI drive doesn't have a terminator jumper. Looking in my SCSI cable bin, I have one LVD320/SE terminator that can be plugged into the NEC-supplied 68-pin cable. Will this terminator work properly in this configuration?

When I still had the v8 BIOS installed, I ran some cachechk comparisons with EDO vs. FPM on this system. Basically,
L1 = 272.6 MB/s
L2 = 148.3 MB/s
RAM Read = 82.2 MB/s (FPM) or 79.2 MB/s (EDO)
RAM Write = 92.7 MB/s

Notice how FPM scores 3 MB/s faster than EDO. Does this system not take advantage of the speed benefit of EDO memory? I tested the system with ECC mode setup as well as non-ECC mode. Both scored the same in cachechk and Memtest. Also note that the FPM RAM Read speed drops to 81.9 MB/s when using the v14 BIOS instead of v8.

I am down to my few ISA sound cards. I have an AWE64Value with SIMMConn, a Creative Vibra16 CT2980 w/Dreamblaster S2, and an Advance Logic ALS100 w/Dreamblaster S2. I already have systems with the AWE64Gold, so was trying to decide between the Vibra16 and the ALS100. I have neither in systems. I could not find much by way of review on the ALS100, but seems it is SB16 and SB Pro compatible. Which of these two cards would you pick for this system? Use is DOS, Win9x, NT4, and W2K, assuming we can get past the 8 GB HDD limit.

the advance logic is a pretty good card, the OPL3 clone is one of the few that sounds really good

feipoa wrote on 2020-01-10, 10:31:

The onboard SCSI appears to be Ultra Wide, so up to 40 MB/s. I tried using an Ultra160 SCSI cable, but the HDD wasn't recognised. The SCSI cable that comes with the system does not have a terminator and my Ultra160 SCSI drive doesn't have a terminator jumper. Looking in my SCSI cable bin, I have one LVD320/SE terminator that can be plugged into the NEC-supplied 68-pin cable. Will this terminator work properly in this configuration?

Yes that active terminator should work since it is labeled /SE, sounds similar to the one I am using. Be sure to enable Term Power on your drive.

I'm using an SCA80 SCSI drive with an 80-pin to 68-pin adapter, so there isn't a terminator power jumper.

My ALS100 card isn't the most impressive card visually, shown next to the Vibra16.

My SCA adapters do not have a TP jumper either but my Quantum 10k SCA drives do have a TP jumper, my IBM SCA drives do not. Was just remembering some issues running certain scsi drives and using Active term on older scsi adapters and enabling TP in both adapter and drives solved it.

I am thinking of using a jumper-set SB16 or jumper-set AWE32, am not going to mess with anything Plug and Pray on a Pentium Dually 😁

feipoa wrote on 2020-01-10, 10:31:

I ran some cachechk comparisons with EDO vs. FPM on this system. Basically, L1 = 272.6 MB/s L2 = 148.3 MB/s RAM Read = 82.2 MB/ […]
Show full quote

I ran some cachechk comparisons with EDO vs. FPM on this system. Basically,
L1 = 272.6 MB/s
L2 = 148.3 MB/s
RAM Read = 82.2 MB/s (FPM) or 79.2 MB/s (EDO)
RAM Write = 92.7 MB/s

Notice how FPM scores 3 MB/s faster than EDO. Does this system not take advantage of the speed benefit of EDO memory? I tested the system with ECC mode setup as well as non-ECC mode. Both scored the same in cachechk and Memtest. Also note that the FPM RAM Read speed drops to 81.9 MB/s when using the v14 BIOS instead of v8.

That is about same results as mine. I tried to solder the 40pin IDE socket on my spare board and bricked it, it was a bit flakey already (was from the badly beatup case in the pic no longer avail on page 5 by cpushack), it won't POST and does not beep 🙁
added: it actually could be a video feature connector as the traces run toward the Cirrus chip. Also tried a few of the reserved jumpers, none disabled anything but did alter a few of the addresses of the controllers. Best to leave them as on the case label...

Your board completely died after trying a hard drive on the 40-pin pads? But isn't there an option in the BIOS for IDE hard drives? I've temporarily put my case back in the closet so I can't check now - I found a leak on the roof and am going nuts with buckets.

There is a section in the BIOS under Advanced to enable or disable the integrated IDE controller. Also on the first page, there is the auto or manual selection of Master and Slave IDE drives. Did you try enabling these prior to connecting your IDE drive? I suspect that the 40-pin solder pads are for an IDE HDD.