Bootable Sii 3112: need help finding one (SOLVED)

Followup to trying to put a Sii 3114 card in, whicih didn't work.

The Rosewill card I ordered to replace the 3114 turned out to be a 3512, not a 3112. Once again, no boot.

(oddity: for a while, it would start to boot from the CD on the onboard VIA, but end up showing only the two SATA drives, and showing my WB background and behavior.)

Does anyone sell a 3112 based board that is known to allow booting?

I've looked at newegg, Tigerdirect, and Geeks and the only Sii boards I can find anymore are all 3512.

Paul

@Paul
Quote:
I have two of them installed in my XE and have been booting from them no problem. I purchased them from AmigaKit at the time.

@Paul

I've not tried this one, but it does have the 3112 chipset:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product ... 12-_-15-280-004-_-Product

@ssolie

Quote:

Thanks. Email sent to Amigakit.

@logicalheart

Thanks. I'm "gun shy" now. I want some assurance that the next card I buy will actually do what I want it to. My collection of Sii controller cards is already up to three (counting my 0680). Pretty soon I'll have to open an ebay store to dump it all! (seriously, once I can boot from SATA, I might put the 3114 in and use the 3114 for hooking up my backup hard drive, and replace my aging DVD drive with a SATA DVD along with my boot hard drive on the 3112.)

Paul

Hi @ssolie

...it would start to boot from the CD on the onboard VIA[]
You can't mix the internal VIA and external SATA, right? You had to turn-off VIA? My Adaptec SII0680 card would never bootup with VIA, until I had this instruction:

ide_maxbus=0

But, this was back-in OS4 'Final'. Did that change in OS 4.1 ?
I thought we were using A1ide now. Maybe the better instruction is:

A1ide_maxbus=0

What did you setup for your IDE card?

@Snuffy

Quote:

Not sure how I had it set up back with 4.0. But in 4.1, and with updates 1 and 2 on 4.1 I've had the two hard drives on the Sii 0680 both set as Master, and the DVD set up on the VIA (just because of cable length issues) and it has worked without any boot trouble.

Now that you mention it, though, last night when I put the 0680 and old drives back in, if I had the update 1 CD in the VIA DVD drive, I'd get a black screen forever after the OS 4.1 splash screen came up. If I took the CD out of the drive, and recycled with the case restart button, it booted fine.

Maybe it was picking up some wrong slb info or some wrong kickstart modules on the CD which didn't work with update 2 on the hard drive??

BTW, I take the easy way out now and use the Prefs utility for setting and changing UBoot settings. The only time I change anything in the uboot menu anymore is when I need to boot from something other than my hard drive. It seems the UBoot prefs tool is quite stable now.

Paul

Hi @Paul

Maybe it was picking up some wrong slb info or some wrong kickstart modules on the CD which didn't work with update 2 on the hard drive??
I had a lot problems getting the hard-drives to boot up to OS4 'final' with the Adaptec sii card. Everything was cleared-up by killing the "automatic" settings; i.e., I set the devices types instead of using 'automatic'. I reasoned that the signals weren't that clear and defined. This was all done years ago and my sii card and HDs still run fine. IO sometimes gets to be a pain trying to find that 'bit' setting that works!

The big thing I don't know about your XE is the DMA repairs you had done. I didn't go that route. So, I'm saying, you might want to drop your repair tech an email about this before venturing into more external IDE.

I hope you find a handle to this problem. The answer is just around the corner, but it's a hell of a corner to turn sometimes!

I'm now booting from my SATA drives.

Computer Geeks briefly had a Sii 3112 on sale. I got one before they sold out. I never did get a reply from Amigakit to my email.

Both drives now show up and boot correctly, while I can still boot from the PATA DVD drive if I need to (and change the boot device in the UBOOT menu.)

Paul

@Paul

Sorry about that- we will search for it in our mailboxes

Hi @Paul
I'm now booting from my SATA drives.
Great! So what do i need to know when buying a 3112 card?
A certain chipset only?

@Snuffy

It seems that as long it's a Sii 3112 it works. Mine is the "famous" "BAFO" branded controller card. [/sarcasm mode] The chipset is a 3112A. I have a feeling the "A" doesn't really make any difference in the funcionality in an A1. It has absolutely NO jumpers of any kind on it as far as changing to RAID or non-raid. Doesn't even have pins for LED's. But it works!

I've kept my 3114 card for future use with any non-booting devices.

Subjectively it seems a little bit faster than the Sii 0680 PATA setup I had. But it could just be the new hard drives. They each have a 32MB cache. These Hitachi's are also quieter than the Western Digital and the Seagate I had in there before.

Paul