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SCSI host adapter not installing its BIOS

J

jgutsell

Junior Member
I have an Adaptec 2940 Ultra adapter in a PC with the A7M266 MB. It's running W2000 Pro.
The adapter has a Plextor CD-ROM and CD-RW installed.
The devices are running, though not as fast as I had expected.
What's bothering me is that during bootup the Award BIOS initializes the Adaptec card and the Plextor devices. But then the Adaptec card displays the message "SCSI BIOS not installed."

What can cause the adapter to not load its own BIOS? I am stumped where to look. I've opened Adaptec's SCSI Select utility but everything looks fine. Anyway, I'm guessing that there is a conflict somewhere.

Jeff G
 
From my experience, it's because you don't have a bootable device installed. If you had, say, a SCSI HD on there with an OS loaded, then the BIOS on the card would load when it detects the drive.

Since you've only got CDROM's on there, it won't load the BIOS up.

Mine acts the same way.
 
In general, a mass storage controller's BIOS is only required if there are bootable devices to support. Most SCSI controller BIOSes are intelligent enough to remove themselves again if no boot device found.

It'll install itself when you have a HDD on SCSI, or when you insert a bootable CD in one of the drives.

regards, Peter
 
That's the way it is supposed to be. SCSI BIOS is only required when the internal boot drive is SCSI.
 
Once again, the Anandtech site teaches me something important. I wish I had learned of this site a long time ago.

By the way, I realized today that Windows 2000 reports that I have the following devices all on IRQ 9:
* The Adaptec card.
* The nVidia card.
* My 2 USB hubs.
* The Microsoft ACPI system device
* My 3Com LAN card.

Is that a problem?

I discovered earlier today that every time I boot the PC, the Windows Event Viewer reports the following error three times:
"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Scsi\aic78xx1. "
Obviously, that's my Adaptec driver. I'm not sure what to do about this.
 
See this FAQ to answer your question about the IRQ sharing. As for the event log error, I used to get that as well. You can try updating the driver with the one on Adaptec's website or just ignore it.
 
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