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Seagate ST-01/-02 BIOS at http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/rom/rom.htm not up to date

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z80eu

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Feb 26, 2014
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That supposed "3.3.2" image has been brought to my attention before.

If I look at the known 3.2 image, I see "SEAGATE SCSI BIOS REVISION 3.2" at the start, and I can see lots of other text strings.
If I look at the known 3.3 image, I see "SEAGATE SCSI BIOS REVISION 3.3" at the start, and I can see lots of other text strings.

If I look at the supposed 3.3.2 image, I see something very very different. And no text strings at all !

For something that, by the ".2" suffix, is meant to be a minor upgrade to 3.3, the major content difference does not make sense.
Another question is, why aren't the first two bytes equal to 55/AA; the BIOS ROM signature bytes?
 
modem7 said:
If I look at the supposed 3.3.2 image, I see something very very different. And no text strings at all !

For something that, by the ".2" suffix, is meant to be a minor upgrade to 3.3, the major content difference does not make sense.
Another question is, why aren't the first two bytes equal to 55/AA; the BIOS ROM signature bytes?
Click to expand...

The ROM-file is inside a gzip archive.

This is a "dump" in debug of the actual binary;
Code: 
-d100
155F:0100  55 AA 0C EB 50 EB 03 EB-00 CB 33 C0 E9 ED 13 77   U...P.....3....w
155F:0110  22 53 45 41 47 41 54 45-20 53 43 53 49 20 42 49   "SEAGATE SCSI BI
155F:0120  4F 53 20 52 45 56 49 53-49 4F 4E 20 33 2E 33 2E   OS REVISION 3.3.
155F:0130  32 0D 0A 21 28 43 29 20-43 6F 70 79 72 69 67 68   2..!(C) Copyrigh
155F:0140  74 20 31 39 38 38 2C 31-39 39 31 20 53 45 41 47   t 1988,1991 SEAG
155F:0150  41 54 45 0D 0A 55 0E 0E-07 1F 33 DB FA E4 21 50   ATE..U....3...!P
155F:0160  24 FE E6 21 FB BE 90 20-E8 F9 0F BE 33 00 E8 F3   $..!... ....3...
155F:0170  0F FC BA 40 00 B8 55 AA-BE 00 18 8B CA 8B FE F3   ...@..U.........

Looks legit to me. ;) I guess you were looking at the compressed file?
 
modem7 said:
That supposed "3.3.2" image has been brought to my attention before.

If I look at the known 3.2 image, I see "SEAGATE SCSI BIOS REVISION 3.2" at the start, and I can see lots of other text strings.
If I look at the known 3.3 image, I see "SEAGATE SCSI BIOS REVISION 3.3" at the start, and I can see lots of other text strings.

If I look at the supposed 3.3.2 image, I see something very very different. And no text strings at all !

For something that, by the ".2" suffix, is meant to be a minor upgrade to 3.3, the major content difference does not make sense.
Another question is, why aren't the first two bytes equal to 55/AA; the BIOS ROM signature bytes?
Click to expand...

You have to uncompress it first. It's a legit, working BIOS, and it contains about 1KB more code than V3.3 ... I am using it, and it supports big HDDs (above 500MB) as well.
 
Krille said:
I guess you were looking at the compressed file?
Click to expand...
Yes. The question is, why is a .BIN extension being used instead of .GZ


Some interesting strings:

"MATSHITALF-3000"
This could be Matshita model LF-3000. Matshita does use 'LF-' at the start of some model numbers.

"(In SQ5110 drive) SyDOS SCSI BIOS REVISION 3.3.5"
Syquest SQ5110 88MB tape drive. SCSI interface.

This may be a custom BIOS.
 
modem7 said:
Yes. The question is, why is a .BIN extension being used instead of .GZ
Click to expand...

The link ends with .BIN but the actual filename in the download dialog ends with .gz so it must be a browser quirk (I'm using IE8).
 
Last edited:
Meanwhile I was able to use the V3.32 (aka SyDOS SCSI BIOS V3.35) ROM directly in my ST-02.
I was not able to use a 40MB SCSI Conner drive directly - which was formatted with ROM V3.0, but after reinitializing the HDD, FDISK and FORMAT C: /S I was able to use it (and to boot etc.).

A test with a Seagate ST51080N was not successful (Format Error after a long time of waiting, everytime I boot I got the message "Drive C has not been installed, and does not contain installation software. Do you want to install this unit? (Y/N) " again and again), although I was not able to use the ST51080N with the older ROM V3.0 too ...
 
Krille said:
The link ends with .BIN but the actual filename in the download dialog ends with .gz so it must be a browser quirk (I'm using IE8).
Click to expand...
Must be. I just now tried IE, and the file downloads as a .gz
Back to Firefox, and the file downloads as a .BIN

z80eu said:
I am using it,
Click to expand...
That's good information. I have added the image to my web site.

Had no one verified operation of the image, I may have still added it to my web site, but with a caveat like, "UNTESTED - May be for custom versions of the ST02"
 
I never trust browsers to download anything which needs to be checksum-correct. ROM images, executables, tar.gz, .zip I always download with wget. I just copy the link off from the browser.

-Tor
 
Will this work on any version of the ST-01? I seem to recall some discussion that you had to have a later rev board to use the later BIOS?

Thanks,

Wesley
 
Recently I acquired a ST-01 with 3.3.2. Will provide an update on how it works out. Starting out with a small SCSI. Will then upgrade.
 
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