From: Shawn M. Shea  Subject: [PCBUILD] adaptec host adapter


> I have an Adaptec 1542b host adapter that I had running fine on a PI133
with
> 5 devices (2 scsi cd-rom, 1 drive (I boot from an ide drive), a zip drive
> and a scanner). I have upgraded to a PII400 and now I cannot get the card
to
> work at all. It is terminated properly. I have tried just using internal
and
> just using external devices and it absolutely will not work. I have gotten
> the error cannot find id#0 lun#0 on bootup sometimes but that is it. It
> shows up as a conflict in device manager but there isn't one. I have the
> latest drivers, etc. Does anyone have any ideas, I am unable to use half
of
> my machine because of it. Thanks.
>
> Shawn M. Shea

I have found that motherboards react differently when you have a scsi drive
and boot from an IDE drive.  I changed a Adaptec 2940UW controller from a
Supermicro motherboard to an Abit motherboard.  The Supermicro motherboard
had a setting in the bios which allowed me to select the IDE drive to boot
from.  Everything co-existed in that machine perfectly.  When I upgraded the
motherboard to the Abit board, I had problems selecting the IDE drive to
boot from and still have the Adaptec bios installed on the SCSI card for
support for drives larger then 1 gb and Int 13.  Getting an error cannot
find id#0 when you boot probably means that your computer is looking for the
SCSI drive to boot from but there is no bootable id#0 scsi drive.  Check
your bios and see if it lets you select the boot drive.  The Abit board let
me select the boot order but still did not like the Adaptec card with the
bios installed unless I would use the SCSI drive to boot from.  The
Supermicro board had a setting not for boot order but specifically for boot
drive which may have been the reason that I didn't have any trouble with
this configuration on this board.

I/O devices like network cards and SCSI cards do not like to share an IRQ
with other cards and may not work if they do.  This could cause your SCSI
card not to function properly and to show up in Device Manager as having a
conflict.  When a device shows up as a conflict no resources are allocated
to it, so I am confused when you say there is no conflicts as I haven't been
able to tell what resources plug and pray has tried to set the device for.
Do you have any free IRQ's available for the SCSI card? When I have had
conflicts, I have had to go into the bios and assign IRQ's ( which the Abit
boards allow you to do) to prevent Windows 98 plug and pray from assigning
the IRQ's for some cards.  Most of the time when I try to change the IRQ's
in Device Manager I get a message saying that "That resource setting cannot
be modified".  That is why I have had to change the IRQ's in the bios.  I
believe I have been able to change the IRQ settings for some ISA cards from
Device Manager without getting that message.  I have all of my SCSI cards,
ISA or PCI set to either IRQ 10 or 11.

If you are not able to set the boot drive from the bios then you might have
to make your SCSI drive your boot drive to get the SCSI and IDE drives to
co-exist.

Mary Wolden

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