I have a Tekram scsi controller with a 53C875 chipset. OpenVMS will start to boot on a PC164 board but stops with a rom checksum error because its not a genuine DEC part.
Has anyone had success flashing the firmware or even hacking the OpenVMS drivers?
> I have a Tekram scsi controller with a 53C875 chipset. OpenVMS will > start to boot on a PC164 board but stops with a rom checksum error > because its not a genuine DEC part.
If I remember correctly Tekram used generic NEC/Symbios Logic/LSI chipsets but in a non-standard configuration with non-NEC/Symbios Logic/LSI firmware. This often caused problems when other NEC/Symbios Logic/LSI-based controllers (which basically are all the same standard design using NEC/Symbios Logic/LSI's SDMS firmware) worked fine. As far as I remember because of the different configuration standard SDMS firmware (which is also used in genuine DEC cards) does not work with Tekram controllers.
I'd drop it and get a non-Tekram controller with the same chip.
Adam Stouffer <adam_stouf...@hotmail.com> wrote: > I have a Tekram scsi controller with a 53C875 chipset. OpenVMS will > start to boot on a PC164 board but stops with a rom checksum error > because its not a genuine DEC part. > Has anyone had success flashing the firmware or even hacking the OpenVMS > drivers?
I never had success with Tekram's Symbios-based controllers and Alpha. However, a "genuine noname" 53C875 worked out of the box for me. OpenVMS just accepted it, Tru64 complained about an "unsupported controller" but worked anyway.
> I never had success with Tekram's Symbios-based controllers and > Alpha. However, a "genuine noname" 53C875 worked out of the box > for me. OpenVMS just accepted it, Tru64 complained about an > "unsupported controller" but worked anyway.
> Wolfgang Rupp
Doing some reading turned up a post claiming that OpenVMS checks the pci id of the card before installing. I found an updated firmware version for the Tekram card and tried to use a hex editor on the file to change the vendor id to what DEC used. However I did not realize that to find the string you had to reverse the order. I changed the wrong one and the card still worked. I made the correct change and tried to flash the card the next day but the program simply refused and the card would only hang my PC indefinitely.
Would it have worked if I changed the right string? Not sure. But I did locate a cheap DEC card on ebay. Amazing how the AGP versions of the Elsa Synergy cards are dirt cheap while the PCI versions go for hundreds!
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