wirerogue wrote on 2020-01-14, 22:38:

in my server i have 2 different sas cards. when booting, it only loads the rom from 1 of the cards.
you could just try loading both cards in your system. it should only load 1 of the roms.
you might have switch them around to get the good rom to load.

exactly my experience. some boards can do more option roms, but usually 2-3 is enough that it will overload option rom space. You will want to detect cards from slot 1-5 etc in that order then put the 29160 last slot during detection.

Still no luck - I've tried the "hot plug" suggestion, booting the PC first then inserting the 29160 after. Ran the update floppy but got an error code saying "no Adaptec adapter found".

I also tried to jam as many cards with option ROMs as I could find until I ran out of PCI slots:

intel network card with PXE
Promise SATA card
Promise IDE card
Adaptec 2940U2W
the broken 29160

I found the correct PCI slot order so that all the option ROMs from the other cards load before the 29160, but the 29160 still manage to break the boot sequence after. I guess the motherboard has enough memory to run all these option ROMs sequentially. (ASUS P3B-F). I still have the option of freeing another PCI slot by removing the PCI video card and using an ISA card, and find an additional card with an option ROM to try and saturate the memory, or to try with a different motherboard.

To be continued...

Do you have a PCI-board with a not-compressed BIOS? A 486 should be OK. If yes, I can patch out the option ROM initialization and you can rewrite it in your EPROm-burner.
I also need the POST code when the PC hangs and some codes before that.

Sorry for the late reply - I finally managed to get my hands on a 486 board with PCI and have been trying the adaptec card in it. When the system hangs at POST, the diagnostic card reports error code 5250.

I'm using the 3.06 BIOS archived in this thread - I'm not sure how to tell if it's compressed or not but when I programmed the EEPROM in a TL866ii I could see some plain english so I suppose it's not?

Its compressed. 1st 64 kb seems to be the compressed ROM, 2nd 64 kb is an option ROM (SCSI?).

When open the file with winrar it seems to decompress the compressed ROM to a 128 kb file (attached). It would be easy to patch this file but I dont know how to recompress and get it running...

Can you try to flash this one directly? If it works I can modify it. If not choose another board or find a way to recompress and get it running 😉

Thanks a lot for your help with this! Unfortunately I can't test right now as I no longer have access to this motherboard at the moment, but I will report the results here when I can 😀