Bad Idea - Adaptec 29160i

[bigbeark]

This is a "brainless" SCSI card. Look closely there is no Bios chip on the card. Had the misfortune to buy several of these, thinking low profile card, how nice.

These are used in some HP server, the design makes them instant landfill, unusable anywhere else

[mockingbird]

Re: Bad Idea - Adaptec 29160i

1) It looks like there are two empty places there for chips to go in. My guess one of them is the cache and the other the BIOS. If you could get a hold of the correct part (It looks like a standard square bios chip you could salvage off a motherboard), you could flash it and solder it on. It's a lot easier than you think.
2) A lot of motherboards had SCSI bios integrated into theirs for these type of cards. Though I never saw any with Adaptec, mostly LSI IIRC.

[ratdude747]

Re: Bad Idea - Adaptec 29160i

i think there are some other missing SMD parts... i wouldn't try that. OEM's like to do that... reminds me of dell dimensions w/o the floppy also missing the floppy caddy... strip it down until it fails, and replace the last part.

i thought ebay had cards with a brain cheap... i spent $12 for a 2 port 3ware hardware raid ATA133 card... perfect match for the fileserver conversion of a hp evo d530... well, that and a little mod to reroute the HDD light to the card... i came across a lot of old scsi cards with that port cheap... but not compact at all (they were monsters)

[pfrcom]

Re: Bad Idea - Adaptec 29160i

Maybe intended for use as a secondary to a primary 29160 family card, to support > 15 devices, and the primary provides BIOS

But no use on its own as a primary, as you've discovered

[ratdude747]

Re: Bad Idea - Adaptec 29160i

if you were running linux (this may be possible with windows as well), you could use a tiny drive for the bootloader and use that to boot the scsi.