mightyhal
n00b
Joined: 30 Jan 2006
Posts: 15
|
 Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 4:18 am Post subject: Promise Fasttrak66 via Magma PCI expansion [works!] |
 |
|
Spring break is here, so I've had some free time and have been playing with some random hardware I've inherited/hoarded.
First, I ]have a Magma PCI expansion unit (PCI-->PCI, 32-bit/33MHz, 7 slots). The unit has a PCI card you put in the host, then you run a cable to another box (with its own power supply and room for hard drives), and instantly you have room for 4, 7, or 13 more PCI cards in your system (or you can chain them together and add morecards). If you haven't seen these, they were really popular back in the day on Avid Editiing systems, and still are around for various oddball applications. In the Sun world, they made SBUS-->Serial or PCI, and from what I can tell were often used to create large network interface/routing beasts. They also make units to go from laptop PCMCIA to PCI boxes and such.
According to Magma, the PCI expansion box should play well with any OS ever made (well, just about.. except for Windows, which needs drivers--poor suckers). Their install guide even has an appendix on how to install in a Sun box. The short version is shut everything off, put the cards in the PCI expansion unit, put the host card in any slot of the Sun machine (in my case, I wanted to use a 33MHz slot since its the older card and dont want to waste my fast bus), connect the cable. Always turn on the PCI expansion unit first, then the Sun.
The first time I tried, I didnt have the host card seated firmly, I think. Second attempt worked very well. To make sure the card is getting recognized by the OBP, before you get to SILO:
You'll get a long list of everything the OBP finds... if all is well, you should see in the mess something like:
| Code: |
pci@8,700000/pci@3/pci@4
pci@8,700000/pci@3/pci@4/raid@7
pci@8,700000/pci@3/pci@4/ethernet@5
|
Your numbers and cards will, of course vary. For my example, the pci@3/pci@4 is the expansion unit's PCI bus, and then the raid@7 is the Promise Fasttrak 66 card and the ethernet@5 is another random ethernet card I plugged in for grins. The @7 and @5 seem to refer to which slot they are in (since the slots start counting at 4 in the box).
| Code: | lspci
0001:02:07.0 RAID bus controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC20262 (FastTrak66/UltraTrack66) (rev 01) |
The second thing I was working on was getting a Promise Fasttrak 66 Card to work in my Sun box. I'd been told there was very little chance of it happening, since it is meant only for x86 arch. But I'm not one to be dissuaded, and so I plugged it in, compiled the appropriate drivers (IDE support, and the Promise Disk Controller driver--pdc202xx_old--my card is based on the pdc20262 chip).
Plug in the card and reboot. When you boot the new kernel, look for the driver looking for the drives and probing and such in the dmesg output (if you have problems). In my case, it worked like a charm with one drive plugged into channel 1 (soon as I remembered to actually boot the newly compiled kernel). And then you can do nifty things like:
| Code: | | mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/old-windows |
Of course, the RAID portion isn't working (since I have no way to get into the card's BIOS routines and have it setup the raid), but the card does what I wanted--act just as a plain vanilla IDE controller, so I can copy off a bunch of stuff from my old x86's hard drives.
I doubt, of course, that any of this will be particularly useful to anyone, but who knows.. maybe it will give someone an idea...
_________________
MightyHal
---
Sun Blade 1000 dual 900 MHz... |
|
Gentoo on Sparc
