I've been looking for a Linux driver for this card everywhere
but couldn't find anything, so as a last resort I'm trying if
kernel developers themselves would know anything about it.
The biggest problem is that I don't know exactly what this card
is -- I got it for free with the harddisk (and actually with the
rest of the machine). Here's all the information I could gather
from it:
* It's originally from a HP Vectra PC, i286.
* It seems to be made by HP.. there's a HP logo and (probably)
model number 48L after it on the card.
* In addition to all miscellaneous chips, there are two chips
made by Adaptec on the card: AIC-300 and AIC-010.
Year 1983 is printed on these chips :-)
* It requires additional power input (in addition to what it
gets via the ISA slot).
* The harddisk connected to it gets its power via the data
cable, that is, there's no separate power for the disk.
* It would seem to present itself as a SCSI card to the
system. At least it boots to DOS (there was a DOS installed
on that disk when I got it) without the disk being present
in the BIOS. I don't know if anything else than SCSI works
this way, though.
* Some weird Sun hardware reference mentioned that Adaptec
AIC-010 has been used in some {MFM,ESDI}->SCSI converters. I
sincerely hope this is not such a beast (although it wouldn't
make any difference in practise though) :)
In case there's no possibility to get Linux to recognize this
card+harddisk, I'd like to hear if any other Unix supports
it. Either I could use such directly or port the driver. I
already took a look at NetBSD and FreeBSD but that was a dead
end. I really need to get some 32bit Unix working with it for
running Apache (AFAIK there's no DOS port of Apache yet ;) ).
PS. If there's some unofficial hacks even for some card that's
close to this, I'd like to see them in case I could modify them
to work with this one too.
Thanks in advance!
//Hannu