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 😀

MMaximus wrote on 2020-03-17, 20:08:

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 😀

Hey Maximus, did you happen to find any solution to this?

I just bricked my perfectly working 29160 yesterday. I tried to flash the card with a Mac bios and the only BACKUP.BIN I had was stored on a now dead 3.5 floppy. Bummer.

subhuman@xgtx wrote on 2022-07-15, 04:32:

MMaximus wrote on 2020-03-17, 20:08:

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 😀

Hey Maximus, did you happen to find any solution to this?

I just bricked my perfectly working 29160 yesterday. I tried to flash the card with a Mac bios and the only BACKUP.BIN I had was stored on a now dead 3.5 floppy. Bummer.

Sorry about your card, in the end I couldn't manage to reflash it so I sold it for parts.

my 2 cents...

Wouldn't temporarily shorting two data pins on the eeprom,
before and during bootup,
cause the bios to never be found
and thus allow the computer to boot,
after which the short should be removed
and then the bios update procedure can be completed.

like pin 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20 or 21, on an AT28C010, pick two and short'm together, stick a needle in between (make sure it doesn't fall out), or hold a knife point on two pins (don't push too hard and cut off the pins)

make sure to look up the correct pins on the datasheet of the eeprom.
the eeprom id number should be located on the eeprom itself under the bios version sticker.

MMaximus wrote on 2022-07-15, 08:48:

subhuman@xgtx wrote on 2022-07-15, 04:32:

MMaximus wrote on 2020-03-17, 20:08:

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 😀

Hey Maximus, did you happen to find any solution to this?

I just bricked my perfectly working 29160 yesterday. I tried to flash the card with a Mac bios and the only BACKUP.BIN I had was stored on a now dead 3.5 floppy. Bummer.

Sorry about your card, in the end I couldn't manage to reflash it so I sold it for parts.

Maximus, no biggie. Did you try using Uniflash140?

I fixed my card and manage to bypass Adaptec's shitty flash tool locks. Here's the deal:

Grab uniflash140 from the net.
Get the latest bios for your 29160 from Adaptec's website.
Run the self-extracting zip file and rename the .BIN bios file to whatever you like (I used backup.bin for the sake of simplicity)
Boot DOS from floppy or whatever means you've got to do it without XMS or EMM386 loaded into memory.

Run aflash4.exe or aflash5.exe -scan and take note of your cards' bus and dev number. Depending on which slot the card is installed, you'll get different numbers. My rig has an ASUS P3B-F and I have the 29160 installed on the 5th PCI slot, so the utility returns a result of bus 00 dev 13.

Type in uniflash -pcirom 0 13 0 (use the bus and dev numbers you already got from flash4/5 and add an extra 0) -e nameofthebios.bin.

In my case it looked like the following uniflash.exe -pcirom 0 13 0 -e backup.bin

Wait until you get a confirmation screen and press 1, then enter.

Wait until the progress bar ends and you'll hear a short speaker beep.

If everything went fine, you'll get the SCSI bios loading properly on the next boot.

That is great and Thanks ! I wonder if it will work on a Dell OEM Adaptec 2940U (with a eeprom) that the Adaptec flasher says No too. Is exact same as my other 2940U that I did flash.
Will have to give it a try one of these days because BIOS 1.23 for that card does not support > 8.4GB HD's and the Atmel AT29C512 is 5v flashable.....just rambling ;p

Nice work congrats

Horun wrote on 2022-07-16, 00:55:

That is great and Thanks ! I wonder if it will work on a Dell OEM Adaptec 2940U (with a eeprom) that the Adaptec flasher says No too. Is exact same as my other 2940U that I did flash.
Will have to give it a try one of these days because BIOS 1.23 for that card does not support > 8.4GB HD's and the Atmel AT29C512 is 5v flashable.....just rambling ;p

So... did it work? 😜