Atto Silicon Express IV - Causing system errors

Ok, trying to 'hot flash' this card - booting without the EPROM in place, it starts up fine, but the card clearly not detected.

I'm trying to flash it using the files here: http://www.fenestrated.net/~macman/stuff/SiliconExpress/

The 1.65 package says there's nothing to update when I force flash it (hold shift - enter the slot number, i.e. $0C). There's a 2.1rc2 download, but it's just a single .bin file when unzipped. No resource fork, so how do I run it?

seeing as 68kmla, is a concept, I think it's just good to hear that there will once again be 68kmla presence upon the net.

Use the SiliconExpress Updater utility to upload the .bin ROM file to the card.

That can't be right - the .bin file that comes out of the 2.1rc2 zipfile is ~100KB in size (almost precisely the same as the Updater utility in the 1.65 driver package), there's no way the EPROM is that big. At a guess It's probably no more than a few kb. Unless of course it's reprogramming the main Xilinx FPGA's onboard the card.... but I would doubt it.

There don't appear to be any options to speak of with the 1.65 Updater utility when you run it - nothing from the menu that appears to give the ability to change while rom file it is uploads. The only thing it appears to allow you to do is hold space after clicking it in order to force a Nubus slot number.

Why aren't the actual administrators or moderators of 68kMLA coming forth and saying any of this?

I don't actually mind the prospect of a new forum system though, phpBB2 is definitely a bit of a "heavy" system, even here at the PPC it feels a bit heavy considering what the topic is.

Vanilla, as an example, seems to be a system that can retain organization, but that is really elegant and I think represents what we're about as a community. Plus - the forum I've got set up at http://134.114.127.122/forum/ even shows up in NT4's IE2, even though it looks odd, everything is functional.
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Ah, my fault. The zip was being unpacked with MacZip, rather than Stuffit Expander. With Stuffit it retains the file type and it runs like the old 1.65 Update utility... however, I can't seem to get it to update.

My card is in the further slot away, labelled as Slot C on the motherboard.

I've tried entering the following:

$0C = "No Silicon Express IV card were updated"

0C = "Application 'unknown' unexpectedly quit due to error -1"

C = "Application 'unknown' unexpectedly quit due to error -1"

NOOOOOoooooooOOoOoOOO!!!

I mean good but ah cr@p about the backups.

As proposed elsewhere I say get the hard drive from the host server and take up a collection for data recovery - maybe in conjunction with other clients on the same machine

we should start a collection to get the data recovered professionally. If the hosting company still has the hard drive, then they should release it, and we can all donate something like 10 or 20 dollars (american), as PDR costs almost 1k.

-digital

Here's an image of what I get for both update utilities using slot = $0C.

As a reminder, I have to remove the EPROM chip for the IIci to boot, once it has booted, I'm refitting it. The update tool *should* work with this, as detailed here: http://www.applefritter.com/node/5363.

Do you have any other cards installed?

Do none of the clever people here (ie anyone except me as I'm dumb and don't know anything about programming! ) know how to write some script/program etc that gathers all the posts from Google Cache (as I've suggested before), and reform that into a forum, or at least some kind of archive?
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Main system: custom C2D 2.66GHz tower/4GB RAM/2600XT 512 MB/500GB HD/XP Pro x86+Vista Business x64
Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)

if you had an eeprom programmer, you could dump and then erase the eeprom. Or just reprogram the eeprom. Its possible the controller itself is bad? 

Actually, I just poked at google's cache again, and it looks like a lot of the stuff is gone.

You can find what I was able to grab here: http://lisa.sunder.net/68kmla-gcache.tar.bz2 That archive is only 672K. Uncompressed it's about 15mb. The data's in the HTML pages.

The query I originally used to pass to google no longer returns any data, so it's been purged and this is likely the only copy there is. Searching for 68kmla and a few other terms does return some pages, but very few...

If you know of a way to conver those html pages back into something useable by the PHP board, that would be very helpful. You'd probably also want to remove the color highlighting of the terms that google's search introduced and clean up the html a bit too.

But there it is.
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olePigeon said:

Do you have any other cards installed?

Click to expand...

Yes, I have a Powercolour Pro 24XK and Farralon EtherMac II in 0E and 0D, respectively. I can try booting without them, to see if that makes any difference.

techknight said:

if you had an eeprom programmer, you could dump and then erase the eeprom. Or just reprogram the eeprom. Its possible the controller itself is bad? 

Click to expand...

Yes, but it's an old parallel port one - I don't think I've got anything current that I can run it from. Up until a year or two ago I kept an old Pentium IV box running XP just for running the programmer from.

I'd give it a go without any other cards installed.  Wouldn't hurt.

wat about a search in archive.org?

Megatron-uk said:

Yes, but it's an old parallel port one - I don't think I've got anything current that I can run it from. Up until a year or two ago I kept an old Pentium IV box running XP just for running the programmer from.

Click to expand...

The parallel port on the Legacy Port Replicator for the D and E series Dell Latitudes will work with chip programmers -- or at least, with my parallel chip programmer. A long shot, but if you have one of those laptop models, it might be worth picking up a $20 used docking station.

They haven't got anything since April 2006, and even then they seem to have caught only the index page
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Main system: custom C2D 2.66GHz tower/4GB RAM/2600XT 512 MB/500GB HD/XP Pro x86+Vista Business x64
Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)

olePigeon said:

I'd give it a go without any other cards installed.  Wouldn't hurt.

Click to expand...

Ok, removed all cards apart from the SE-IV - the onboard video won't drive my lcd so I wasn't able to observe the onscreen behaviour, but, from observing the HDD light it appears to do the same thing as before - an initial few disk reads (which gets you to the 'Welcome to Mac OS' logo) and then nothing more. Normal behaviour is a few flashes to get the logo, a pause of 2-3 seconds then sustained disk activity while the extensions and desktop load.

Unfortunately, I'm out of ideas.

Well, unless I can work our some way of hooking up my eprom programmer, it looks like I'm out of luck on this one. I have a couple other Macintosh/Apple systems, but the next oldest is a Beige G3, which of course has no nubus slots.

Just FYI, my FWB JackHammer SCSI card freezes the computer if it is not properly terminated (with or without a device connected to the SCSI chain.)

I had to buy a ribbon SCSI terminator and terminate the ribbon cable on the internal 50 pin SCSI connector to get my computer to boot with it installed (but not connected to anything.)  So it might be worth checking your termination again, trying different active terminators just incase one you're using is broken.

Just to update - I haven't had a chance to try different termination yet. I have a couple of passive terminator blocks, but no active ones. I'll give them a go first and if it doesn't work, try to pick up an active terminator. If that doesn't work, then it's probably into the 'box of bits' it goes... until I can get one of my old PC's resurrected to get my eprom reader/programmer working again.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/68kmla.net/viewtopic.php*

Don't click it, copy and paste the whole line.

Megatron-uk said:

Yes, I have a Powercolour Pro 24XK and Farralon EtherMac II in 0E and 0D, respectively. I can try booting without them, to see if that makes any difference.

Click to expand...

Did you have a third card in there before installing the SCSI Card?

If you haven't recapped the board a/o PSU? That'd be my guess. The pet IIfx runs fine, but flakes out (symptom: can't do a scree-shot/CoPro error) with a NuBus "Full House" installed. It's recap time for my puppy.

It seems to be pretty much all from November 2005 though I think they have their own backup that goes up to about February 2006; doesn't look like there's much there that's newer than that.
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Main system: custom C2D 2.66GHz tower/4GB RAM/2600XT 512 MB/500GB HD/XP Pro x86+Vista Business x64
Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)

So I was able to grab all the pages from archive.org based on the search criteria found here.

I've not yet looked at the HTML, but you can download it here:

http://lisaem.sunder.net/68kmla-archive.tar.bz2

So the final step is to write something to extract the posts from the HTML, etc.

I suspect between google and archive.org we should have most of the old posts.
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Whipping the nightmares to a froth
Endless questions with no answers