Recommendations for a good POST card reader.

[mariushm]

Re: Recommendations for a good POST card reader.

There's only one AGP slot per CPU. It's a point-to-point link, between card and processor, unlike PCI which is a shared bus.
I guess it's possible (but highly unlikely) to have 2 agp slots on dual cpu systems.

PCI-X was used for SCSI adapters and for dual/quad gigabit network cards (in servers)

Regular PCI runs at 33.33 Mhz and it's 32 bit wide so ALL cards plugged in the PCI bus share the bandwidth which is a maximum of 133 MB/s

So you can imagine a single PCI gigabit network card, which can reach up to 125 MB/s, would almost saturate the whole bus. You still had onboard audio connected to the pci bus, some motherboards had onboard firewire, some had additional usb and sata controllers connected to the same PCI bus.

PCI-X with 64bit wide and 66 Mhz allowed for up to 533 MB/s of bandwidth, which made it possible to have dual and quad gigabit network cards on servers.


Then we had pci-e which is point to point connection, not a shared bus... sort of like usb but not quite.

* and a bit off topic, but basically AGP was heavily based on PCI. It "talks" like PCI but it's simplified in the sense that there's only one device per bus, there's fixed packet sizes instead of variable, it runs at 66 Mhz instead of 33 Mhz and has some additional stuff pci didn't have. If you're really curious you can read the Wikipedia page for agp : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Graphics_Port

and maybe you want to check the PCI page as well : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_PCI

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Recommendations for a good POST card reader.

It wasn't a TPM you recovered a password from Spork. Its usually fitted to the more business class laptops to ensure data stays encrypted.

Okay. I want to say it was an old 486 IBM ThinkPad (with the red button for a mouse). I remember soldering some really simple device and I connected it to the laptop somehow. I had to solder wires, if I remember correctly, directly to the board. I found the device. There's a serial adapter, and that's how I'd recover the password. I'd hook it to another machine and it'd either just pop right up or I'd run some special program. It has three wires that get soldered to the motherboard. It's got two resistors and two zener diodes. One of the wires has tape around it and I can see where I wrote SDA. The other one must have had the tape ripped off but would have said SCL and the third wire would have said GND.

The password was one of three. They had a BIOS password, a startup password and a hard drive password. I was able to recover the one using this device, reset the other using some jumper on the motherboard or removing the CMOS battery, but the hard drive password I could never get. The password this device recovered was a swear word, like ass. The guy who brought me the PC said his friend was drunk and set them, I don't know if it's true or not.

I tried making a circuit board on a breadboard that would kill the power to the hard drive, that I could control via my computer's serial or parallel cable. I never figured out how to do it. I wrote a program that would try and brute force the hard drive password, using IOCTLS or something along those lines (I don't remember, it was a long time ago). After three attempts, the hard drive had to cycle power to try again. I tried guessing all the swear words I could think of, but couldn't guess it.


I just found the schematics: http://www.normsweb.com/tektips/thinkpad.shtml

It was the Supervisor password that I recovered, and from looking at the site, it looks like it was stored on an Atmel 8-pin DIL (24RF08). I don't know why I thought it was stored in the TPM. Thanks for clearing up my rememory. I think things like this help my brain. A lot of times, my memories get mixed up. I'll remember two separate memories as one and intertwine them sometimes.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Recommendations for a good POST card reader.

There's only one AGP slot per CPU. It's a point-to-point link, between card and processor, unlike PCI which is a shared bus.
I guess it's possible (but highly unlikely) to have 2 agp slots on dual cpu systems.

PCI-X was used for SCSI adapters and for dual/quad gigabit network cards (in servers)

Regular PCI runs at 33.33 Mhz and it's 32 bit wide so ALL cards plugged in the PCI bus share the bandwidth which is a maximum of 133 MB/s

So you can imagine a single PCI gigabit network card, which can reach up to 125 MB/s, would almost saturate the whole bus. You still had onboard audio connected to the pci bus, some motherboards had onboard firewire, some had additional usb and sata controllers connected to the same PCI bus.

PCI-X with 64bit wide and 66 Mhz allowed for up to 533 MB/s of bandwidth, which made it possible to have dual and quad gigabit network cards on servers.


Then we had pci-e which is point to point connection, not a shared bus... sort of like usb but not quite.

* and a bit off topic, but basically AGP was heavily based on PCI. It "talks" like PCI but it's simplified in the sense that there's only one device per bus, there's fixed packet sizes instead of variable, it runs at 66 Mhz instead of 33 Mhz and has some additional stuff pci didn't have. If you're really curious you can read the Wikipedia page for agp : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Graphics_Port

and maybe you want to check the PCI page as well : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_PCI

That PCI-X can be 32-bit as well though, right? Does that mean I can use it as 32-bit or 64-bit, or when it's designed, it was designed as either being 32-bit or 64-bit? Thanks for sharing this. It's been a long time since I dealt with buses and everything. I learned about them in college but that was it. I'm especially thankful you pointed out the gigabit LAN information. This board has built-in dual ethernet ports, but one says ASF. Those built-in ethernet ports would be running on the PCI bus, right? I'm thinking, based on what you said, it might make sense to disable the onboard LAN and use a PCI-X gigabit ethernet card....

There's also SATA connectors, but a group of them says SAS. They're the ones that have the solid state hooked up to them. SAS is Serial Attached SCSI and is compatible with SATA or SCSI drives, right? I'm wondering if I'd see any performance gain if I bought some SAS solid state drives instead of using just normal SATA solid state drives...