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From: "David Alderman" <dave@persprog.com>
Organization: Personalized Programming, Inc.
To: "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG>,
        "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" <michaelv@HeadCandy.com>,
        questions@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 16:13:15 EST
Subject: Re: Which dual Pentium motherboard? Cyrix SMP? 
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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
======================================