A little Sunday morning adventure...
I've been messing with an Adaptec AHA-2940UW controller that in various machines would either lock the machine at the point that the SCSI BIOS should kick in, boot then freeze, or boot and the DOS Adaptec flash utility would say no BIOS present when trying to update it. Attempts to dump the BIOS using Adaptec's flash4.exe resulted in binary data that didn't look anything like a BIOS downloaded from the web.
This has one of those small PLCC-32 EEPROMS, not a DIP type so desoldering then dumped ROM contents with a programmer. The contents resembled but didn't match the dump produced using the flash software. I erased then programmed the chip with the BIOS I downloaded from the web (v2.2 I think) and it verified okay, so probably not a bad EEPROM. I then figured if I've got the chip off I might as well socket it so salvaged a PLCC socket from an unknown board in the junk bin.
Put it all back together, socketed the EEPROM, and was greeted with the SCSI BIOS at startup. So, I guess it was a corrupt BIOS, a bad solder joint, or maybe just a compatibility issue (but I tried it in many machines). It's always a nice feeling to bring something back into working order.
That is all.
I've been messing with an Adaptec AHA-2940UW controller that in various machines would either lock the machine at the point that the SCSI BIOS should kick in, boot then freeze, or boot and the DOS Adaptec flash utility would say no BIOS present when trying to update it. Attempts to dump the BIOS using Adaptec's flash4.exe resulted in binary data that didn't look anything like a BIOS downloaded from the web.
This has one of those small PLCC-32 EEPROMS, not a DIP type so desoldering then dumped ROM contents with a programmer. The contents resembled but didn't match the dump produced using the flash software. I erased then programmed the chip with the BIOS I downloaded from the web (v2.2 I think) and it verified okay, so probably not a bad EEPROM. I then figured if I've got the chip off I might as well socket it so salvaged a PLCC socket from an unknown board in the junk bin.
Put it all back together, socketed the EEPROM, and was greeted with the SCSI BIOS at startup. So, I guess it was a corrupt BIOS, a bad solder joint, or maybe just a compatibility issue (but I tried it in many machines). It's always a nice feeling to bring something back into working order.
That is all.