Foiled again...

[folken]

Without fail I always seem to get screwed when I try to upgrade something. Even when upgrading from ancient crap to old crap I get problems 🙁
My file servers motherboard seemed to be goin out on me (random reboots/shutdowns and such) so I decided it was time for a new file server. It was an asus dual slot 1 workstation motherboard w/ 2 550mhz PIIIs in it, that is gettin a tad on the ancient side. I had two 866mhz PIIIs and 1.7gb of PC133 ECC Reg layin around so I decided to get a motherboard that would work with em, a Tyan Thunder LE (was new for $40 on ebay). I wanted at least 2 64bit slots because my 3ware escalade 7410 controller and 3com 3C996B-T Gigabit Server nic are both 64bit cards. I also purchased 4 250gb seagate drives to give myself a little added capacity
Now my problems begin. When I have the 3ware card plugged in the machine just hangs after completing the memory check. It made it past that once and I was able to get into the raid bios to create the 750gb array, then the machine hung while building the array. It has not gotten that far since. I figured I might as well try a bios update as the 3ware site says the Thunder LE needs to have v1.06 of the bios to work. I couldn't find the current version listed anywhere during post or in the bios to know what is on it so I figured it was worth a shot. One problem, the motherboard doesn't read any floppies. I tried 4 floppy cables, 6 drives, and a stack of floppies but none of them worked. I can see it seeking the drive druring bootup but it just skips it after afew seconds and boots to win2k3 serv (on a 18gb atlas 10kIII scsi drive). When I try to access the floppy in windows it just says "this disk has not been formatted would you like to format it now". I hit yes and it says cannot format disk. I plugged a usb floppy into it and that works fine in windows. But the bios is to old to boot off a usb floppy 🙁
I'm at a complete loss of ideas. I sat around all day today fiddling with stuff and I can't seem to get it to go. I ran 2 instances of prime95 on the system for a week before attempting the change over (3ware card still in old server) to it just to make sure the system was stable.

Complete stats:
2x PIII 866mhz socket370
Tyan Thunder LE (serverworks III LE chipset)
Onboard Rage128 graphics
3x 512mb Crucial PC133 ECC Reg
1x 256mb Crucial PC133 ECC Reg
3com 3C996B-T Gigabit Server Nic (64bit 66mhz, 1st pci slot)
3ware Escalade 7410 (64bit 33mhz, 2nd pci slot)
1x Atlas 10kIII SCSI drive (running at U160)
4x Seagate 250gb 7200rpm 8mb cache IDE
1x SCSI 5.25" hotswap cage
4x IDE 5.25" hotswap cage
Antec TruePower 380watt PSU
Some old Supermicro full tower case
Currently running Windows Server 2003

If anyone has any clues/ideas to either of my above problems I'm up for anything. I just want to get my 3yrs and 300gb of data off my desktop computer and back on a redundant array as soon as I can, lol.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

 

[endyen]

It sounds like it could be an IRQ problem. Try setting the OS to configure the IRQs

 

[folken]

tried swaping the cards around, tried having just the 3ware in there and just the 3com in there. the system works fine in any config until the 3ware card is put in. I also messed w/ the IRQ reservations and doing OS pnp and such but to no avail. This stuff is old but it shouldnt be so old that I need to worry to much about IRQs.

Update: I made a bootcd in nero w/ the bios update and was able to flash the bios to v1.06a. Now it doesn't see the onboard scsi controller. Great...
It is enabled in the system bios but the LSI bios doesn't appear during bootup anymore. The atlas isnt seen in the system bios anymore either 🙁 Due to that I can no longer boot into windows.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

 

[folken]

My friend has a FastTrak SX6000 he wants to sell. That might be a good option as long as the speaker on it doesn't anoy the crap out of me, lol. That is why he is selling it, it likes to beep all the frekin time.
Still, that wont fix my new onboard scsi issue lol. I need that for my boot drive

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

 

[folken]

Yea I know but it I dont need to much disk performance as it is only used as network storage.
On the plus side my 3ware controller works perfectly now w/ the 1.06a bios. I just dont have the scsi controller for a boot drive. I really wanted to use that atlas as a boot drive instead of just making a partition like on my other file server.
I kicked an email to tyan yesturday, lets see what they have to say

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

 

[Crashman]

You can also boot from CD to to your upgrade. I've often put the BIOS on C: and used a Win98 CD to boot to a DOS prompt, but that only works for FAT partitions. Otherwise you'll need to make your own bootable CD.

If you were running 9x you could boot to command prompt and upgrade BIOS from the hard drive too. In fact, you could just use an old hard drive to do such stuff.

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[folken]

Just puttin the bootable floppy w/ bios update on a cd w/ nero is easy enough. Just select bootable cd, choose the floppy, and hit burn. It can't get much simpler than that, lol.
One nice thing about goin off the hd though would have been to save my old bios, cant save that to a cd

No word from Tyan yet, hopefully it is a known and easily fixable issue. I looked around for a LSI scsi bios update but there dont appear to be any for the Thunder LE. Many for the equiv asus board but none for the tyan board.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

 

[folken]

I have finally gotten everything going. I found the magic command to make the scsi controller come back.
amiflash 2510106a.rom /b /c
How adding those switches made all the difference I dont know but it worked so I'm not complaining.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

 

[folken]

Tyan listed some switches for one of the older bios revisions and I figured I'd give it a try for this one. The switches were just to reflash the boot rom /b and to clear the rom before flashing /c. How that fixed it I have no clue but it did so I'm happy
Strange thing is that if I just did amiflash it would give those options before flashing the bios, putting in the switches just made it flash w/o having to choose anything.
Oh well, crazy tyan.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>