> Does this solve the problem for all cases?
Erik has indicated that it doesn't fix his problem at all, so while the
symptoms are the same, he's apparently suffering from a different
problem.
> I have noted that Award Bios based mainboards do not load the add-on bios;
> however, most AMI based mainboards do this correctly.
> The force enable was based on a general concern that off-board chipsets
> are depended on the ROMS for features.
>
> The reason for stroking the rom is to force it on.
> Since the Promise card in all releases (Ultra/Defender/FastTrak)
> all require that the rom be enabled, or the (U)DMA will not be enabled by
> default. Note that FastTrak with always have its bios enabled by default.
Arrgh. This would be the problem I'm wrestling with now. I was going to
wait for a reply from Promise Support before I asked you about it, but
since you brought it up: I'm trying to set up a fast RAID0 with 8G drives
as masters on each of the hwif's of two Ultra33 cards. Getting the system
to boot requires pulling the BIOS of one of the cards. The remaining BIOS
detects all drives during boot, says that it's enabling BM, and all of the
drives are detected as UDMA by the kernel. However, the drives on the
BIOS-less card run much slower than the others - about 3.6Mb/sec vs
12Mb/sec. I was able to duplicate this with ZD Winbench 99 on Win95 with
version 1.36 of the Ultra drivers, so I've pinged (pung?) Promise, but I
haven't heard back from them yet.
What is it about the BIOS that enables the "go-fast" bits? Can we
disassemble it to find out the magic? Surely it's not the actual presence
of the EPROM?
Cheers,
Rick.
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