Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 16:13:15 EST From: "David Alderman" <dave@persprog.com> To: "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG>, "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" <michaelv@HeadCandy.com>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Which dual Pentium motherboard? Cyrix SMP? Message-ID: <2CAAD067AC@novell.persprog.com>
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Gary Palmer replied: > David Alderman wrote in message ID > <26C84A7DC0@novell.persprog.com>: > > Moral of the story: EISA/PCI is fine as long as the floppy controller is > > on the motherboard. > > Umm. You must have had a weird card. The Adaptec 1742 (for example) > has onboard floppy, is an EISA card, and works under FreeBSD. As I > understand it, the floppy has to appear at a certain location in the > BIOS space for it to be seen, and I have yet to hear of a on-board > BIOS specifically for floppy controllers! Of course, the fact it's sat > on an EISA bus may make a difference, I'm not sure... > > So it's not a generic ``you can't use a floppy drive controlled from > an EISA card'', it must have been something specific to the card you > were using. > We were using an Adaptec EISA SCSI card (a 1742 I believe). The problem seemed to come from the fact that this was an EISA to EISA upgrade (rather than a new installation) and the motherboard was not defaulting the floppy. I don't know enough about EISA to know where the configuration is stored (motherboard, card, or both) but I do know that the new motherboard would not recognize the floppy controller properly initially. They stuck in a generic ISA floppy controller to get things going. I think an EISA/PCI motherboard is fine, but because of that configuration floppy it is not hassle-free. Of course, it could have been some BIOS setting that was the real problem or it could have been "operator error". I suspect that if you were installing the cards "cold" in a new installation there would have been no problem. Also, I think the newer ASUS EISA/PCI has the floppy on the motherboard which should eliminate the problem. Then again, let's say you have a floppy controller on the motherboard and a floppy controller on your EISA SCSI controller. How do you run the EISA config to turn off the floppy on the SCSI controller? I left the system administrator a detailed upgrade procedure that I thought was foolproof, but of course I was the fool for thinking that! ====================================== When philosophy conflicts with reality, choose reality. Dave Alderman -- dave@persprog.com ======================================
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