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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!serv.hinet.net!news.cc.nctu.edu.tw!spring.edu.tw!howland.erols.net!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Adatptec 1515 Date: 8 Oct 1996 22:56:49 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 61 Message-ID: <53em7h$lrs@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <32417771.41C67EA6@grolier.fr> <3242009C.26A6@sprynet.com> <52jkoi$8s@uriah.heep.sax.de> <52piuj$14h@newsbr.eunet.fr> <535tnm$1gb@uriah.heep.sax.de> <53cvnf$a4n@newsbr.eunet.fr> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E fgm@osinet.fr (Frederic G. MARAND) wrote: > >> There is at least a restriction on 154x version A and B: you have to > >> have the "gigabyte proms" (not one of the early ones) to handle drives > >> over 1 GB successfully. On old versions, this means reprogramming the > >> chip. > > >You are wrong. My BIOS ROM is certainly much older, and i can use an > >1.2 GB drive fine. Under FreeBSD, i mean. > I don't think so: the info comes straight from Adaptec tech support, That doesn't make it ``more right'' though. > so your PROMs are probably not of the early ones, or you changed them. I should probably know best what happened with my hardware, should i? It's a years old aged AHA1540A, i've got it for free by somebody else who ran it in an old Unix machine... Nope. Nobody ever touched its ROMs. Btw., i've just pulled the card, it is from December, 1989, according to the label on the backside. This was the era when a 100 MB disk was considered huge. :) > The adapter simply can't use disks >1 GB with the early PROMs, it's > not a matter of OS, it only accesses the first GB. We had occasion to No. You (and the Adaptec support) are wrong. Your claim is only true for the BIOS. The firmware doesn't limit the transfer block number not beyond the limitations of the SCSI specs (which use four byte numbers for block addressing, thus allowing for 2^32 * 512 bytes with the common sector format). It's only that the old BIOSes did only offer the 32 sectors per track * 64 heads translation method, making 1 MB per ficticous cylinder. Since the BIOS is limited to 1024 cylinders, this is the 1 GB limit. What they call ``DOS disk space > 1 GB'' these days is an alternate translation method that pushes up to the total limitations of the BIOS, using 255 * 64 sectors per cylinder. > By the way, we are talking GB of size 1 073 741 824, not 1 000 000. > Are you sure this is not what you actually get from your 1.2 GB drive > ? 1.2 GB is quite a bit more than either definition of Megabyte. > Accordingly, Adaptec tech support MIGHT know less about its own > products than you do, so you might be right. Stranger things have been > said to happen. Thinking of non-M$ operating systems is simply much beyond their knowledge and recognition. I doubt the people who are sitting on the support desks these days do even know about the appearance of an AHA1540A at all. :^) They would certainly be surprised that such a big card did ever fit into a computer. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)