Is it Possible to Boot from Mediator PCI SCSI Adapter?

[bubba]

I have a 1200T with a Mediator SX and a Blizzard 1230 IV with the SCSI daughter card.  I'm currently booting off a SCSI HD connected to the blizzard SCSI.

I know the mediator supports PCI SCSI adapters.  Is it possible to boot from a device on the mediator SCSI adapter or do you need an IDE/Floppy boot handler to mount the PCI first?

Thanks!
Bubba

[smf]

You can't boot from it and why would you want to anyway since you got the scsi-kit for your blizzard? it wont be any faster

[bubba]

Thanks for the response.  My blizzard SCSI has been a bit flakey lately.  It may be just a cable connection or a problem with my disk.  I was considering the mediator SCSI as a back-up plan for the blizzard card. It's going to be a lot easier to get a PCI SCSI card instead of a new blizzard SCSI!

Thanks Again,
Bubba

[smf]

I hope you can solve your problems with the blizzard scsi, it's probably one of the best scsi controllers you can get for A1200.

[bbond007]

I have a 1200T with a Mediator SX and a Blizzard 1230 IV with the SCSI daughter card.  I'm currently booting off a SCSI HD connected to the blizzard SCSI.

I know the mediator supports PCI SCSI adapters.  Is it possible to boot from a device on the mediator SCSI adapter or do you need an IDE/Floppy boot handler to mount the PCI first?

Thanks!
Bubba

I don't have a Mediator, so this is just conjecture... but...

From a cold boot I don't think it would be possible unless you were able to burn the Mediator's SCSI.device to a custom EEPROM. I'm guessing the SCSI.device will also be dependent on some sort of PCI.device.

I have not beed able to do this with my FastATA because of ELBox's driver is not "romable", in fact, it fails to load at all if I try to use a custom 3.1 ROM.

Chances are if you can load it as a BlizKick module, then it could be burned to a custom ROM.

Here are instructions on making a custom 1MB ROM. You probably will need to do a 1MB vs 512K to get things to fit...

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=45260

A warm boot is a different story... Once I load the FastATA's driver on my first cold boot, the machine will boot from the secondary IDE port on all subsequent warm boots. It really depends on if the Mediator's SCSI.device stays resident or not.

You could also get tiny IDE Disk on Module and make boot partition. Have the s:startup-sequence simply load the ELBOX drivers and then then simply reboot. If you have a higher priority (or is it lower?) boot partition on your SCSI, then the machine will pick that up and boot...

Hope that helps

[danbeaver]

You cannot cold boot from the PCI card in the Mediator; further speculation is lofty mental fellatio, but you can boot from a CF/SD card to the point the PCI card is initialized and them continue on from it; a warm boot could be arranged (easily in OS 4.1) but more difficult in OS 3.X without the initial boot.

Best yet is to fix the SCSI issue!  Can you be more explicit than "flakey?" Could it just be a termination issue?