Ultra 10 - adding a bootable SCSI controller

[hw-tph]

I have recently purchased a 333MHz Ultra 10. I've already got some more RAM ordered, but what bothers me most is the horribly slow IDE bus (ATA-33) on this thing. I have a 10.000rpm Seagate Cheetah collecting dust in a cardboard box, so I'm itching to put this in but first I need a bootable SCSI controller.

I have browsed around and the most affordable I can find is the Tekram DC-390U2B, but I can't find any information on whether it's bootable on an Ultra or not. It supposedly uses the LSI 53C895 chip which should be well supported in Linux (53cxx) and OpenBSD (siop).

So does anyone know if this will work? Or is there a comprehensive list of non-Sun SCSI cards that will work? The Gentoo/SPARC compatibility list isn't very comprehensive, but I really do appreciate the effort.


Håkan
_________________
Self-admitted computer fetishist

[.:chrome:.]

i have an Ultra-10 workstation with an Adaptec AHA-2940UW PCI controller... it works fine!
i don't have any boot device on it, but i think you have only to set the appropriate boot device in the openprom

[Toady]

[gust4voz]

You can't boot from any scsi controller. There were OBP-capable AHA-2940's but they're scarce, expensive and buggy.
Best shot is aiming for a Sun X6540A, they're pretty common and cheap on ebay, they're basically a rebranded SYM22801.
Note that not all SYM22801's will work on sparc boxes, there's a minority that fail miserably with pci issues, so try getting one of those "Sun" ones - and it isn't BIOS-related, since the firmware comes from the machine itself, the firmware on the board is totally ignored and it's very common to find PC firmwares on them.
_________________
Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey