KZPEA bios?

[Dialup Jon Norstog]

Thank you Jay!

I probably could have been a little clearer in my last post.

On the XP1000 (SRM 5.9-1) the card is recognized in a "show config" as a pair
of Adptec AIC 7899s living on bus 0 and identified as pkbXXX and pkcXXX
However, the attached drives are not seen even in "SH config" 

Neither the card nor the drives show up in "show dev"

Under AlphaBios (5.70) the bios loaded on startup identifying itself by number
(3.10) scanning its two buses and listing the drive information.  Once
Alphabios started up, the SCSI controllers were initialized (again!) with the
Adaptec being identified as "scsibios" and the disk as "scsibios controlled
disk".  Under the PCI configuration feature, the card is listed as Adaptec,
DevID=f620, twice. Alphabios can "see" the drive (configure hard drives
feature) and I'm sure it's bootable although I didn't have NT loaded on the
drives in question.  

Perhaps something could be done under ALphabios using Lilo or Grub in a small
FAT-formatted partition to load Linux?

Just for the hell of it I loaded Tru64 5.1a on a drive attached to the Adaptec
card. The installer identified the card and selected a driver for it
("CHIM-something-or-other"), allowed me to format and install to the drive. 
However when the machine did its post-install reboot SRM *still* could not see
the drive and of course no boot took place.  

On the early-model Miata Jay's advice to "set pci_device_override -1" worked
like a charm and I was able to boot into SRM (7.2-1, SROM 5.90).  "Sh config"
identified the card at bus 0, slot 11:

vendor: 9005 device: c0 subid: f6209005

otherwise results were as with the XP1000.

Under AlphaBios (5.70) the results were as with the XP1000, except there was
some instability until I disabled the PCI bus parity check in the Bios
'advanced options."

I have a late-model Miata (the one with the USB ports).  The results were the
same except that there was no need to reset the pci_override from it default
value of 0. 

It is nice to kow there is nothing wrong with my card (or with me for that
matter).  Maybe the thing to do is to boot from old disks on the Qlogic scsi
bus, but run root, /usr and other stuff off the fast card.  

There seems to be some good news and some bad news here.

There are a lot of Adaptec 39160 cards on eBay right now, most of them listed
as "dell" cards and selling in the $40 range.  On my card the proprietary "S"
disappeared from the bios version after I flashed with a download from
Adaptec, and the card was "read" by SRM in a manner identical to the
$400-dollar KZPEA.  Tru64 had a driver for the card and I'll bet that when i
get around to running it under Tru64 it will be identified as a KZPEA.

I could not do much with the card under Linux.  Linux sees drives on the
64-bit bus (bus 0) as prior to drives on the 32-bit bus, so the drives on the
Adaptec became sda, sdb, etc.  My linux disk got moved down the chain to sdc,
but the installation was still looking for its files on sda.  Perhaps there is
a way to change the way Linux orders the drives it "sees" on the various buses?

Fnally, I am puzzled why Compaq would have listed the KZPEA as an option for
the XP1000 and not written a few lines of SRM code to get it working.  I'll
bet a similar situation prevails with the late model KZPCC RAID controller. 
It all seems so haphazard.

Once again, thanks to Mr. Estabrook for the help.

jn



**********************************************************************
On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 09:06:13AM -0600, Dialup Jon Norstog wrote:
> 
> I recently eBayed an Adaptec 39160 scsi card, having read ion Hideki Goto's
> page that it was "close enough" to the KZPEA to be recognized as such by the
> XP1000 and some other newer boxes.
> 
> On my XP1000, he one I got is recognized by SRM and AlphaBios as an Adaptec,
> not the KZ.

Recognized as which Adaptec? My XP1000 (SRM v5.8) recognizes the
CPQ-branded 39160 as chipset 7899, and never mentions KZPEA...

> I got my late-model PWS to recognize the card in a 64-bit slot as
> well, but it did not read a brand name off the bios.

How were you accessing that?

> (On an early-model PWS SRM refused to load because of the "illegal
> device" on the bus)

Um, try:

        >>> set pci_device_override -1

> In both cases the "recognition" was in "show config."  The card nor
> the drive attached to it did not show in "show device."

On both XP1000 and the PWS's?

> Under AlphaBios, the device and attached drives did show up and were
> accessible.

Oh, for an XP1000 MILO... ;-}

> The Adaptec came with the 2.57 bios and an "S" code, which Adaptec' manual
> says indicates it was a proprietary card.  I flashed with the 3.10 bios, which
> took out the proprietary code.  This however has not helped things on the XP.

I'm not surprised, as (IIRC) only the latest SRMs on the latest platforms
seem to be capable/enabled to run SCSI BIOSes. Earlier SRM did not depend
on the BIOSes for anything, IIRC.

> Is there a Compaq BIOS for the KZPEA, and if so how can I get it?

AFAIK, there's not a COMPAQ-specific  BIOS for it.

As another data point, I've tried some other Adaptec family members
(29160/29160N, both of which use the 7892 chipset, and 2940U2W), and
none are recognized by SRM.

Sigh...

Sorry, Jon, you may be stuck with booting from the QLogic or IDE... :-\

 --Jay++

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Jay A Estabrook                            HPTC - LINUX support
Hewlett-Packard Company - ZKO2-3/N30       (603) 884-0301
110 Spit Brook Road, Nashua NH 03062       Jay.Estabrook at hp.com
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