SCSI Hells

[cremator]

I'm fixing an ancient pc for a neighboor, and things aren't looking so well. He first wanted a CDRom, which, had to be SCSI. I could not get the drive working so I tried to enter the bios. It was passworded. I finally removed the cmos battery to get into the bios, that part worked, except since deleting all of the bios settings, all of the scsi settings are lost / changed to default.The boot process, it does a memory check, it makes it to the final number, then starts over, it does this about 3 times. Next, it shows the scsi host utility, and says "no bios loaded". Finally, it goes to a black screen and tells me to insert a boot disk. I'm lost on what to do, under the bios drive selection, it has 46 different options of drives to choose from. I tried all 46 of them and still no luck. Any help / suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[MichaelD]

It sounds like the SCSI controller has lost it's settings. Does it have a battery on board? Is it replaceable? What about the mobo's battery?

Also, if it's an older setup, the drives and controller may have jumpers that set their SCSI ID. Don't move anything yet until someone that really knows their stuff checks in, please. Possibly there were probs in the past and whomever set it up originally used bios settings that conflicted w/the jumpers, yet it worked anyway? 😕

Just throwing stuff out there. 🙂

 

[cremator]

The actual scsi controller card has no battery, on the scsi bios (actual chip) it says Adaptec Inc - 589201-00 D BIOS 8200 0 1994. Then on the whole card, it says "Adaptec AHA-2940 ASSY 566506-00. The motherboard has a cmos battery, but its an addon battery, it looks like an enclosed double A battery.