[H-GEN] Two questions: SCSI & Dodgy motherboard?

[Paul Gearon]

> The new drive is a 1.2Gb apple SCSI drive, fixed to ID 0 (don't think I
> can change it).

You can indeed.  Win and DOS will both assume that the boot scsi 
drive is C:

> Got it working fine with Win95.  The second drive is a
> 650Mb old (i.e. 1992 vintage)  Fujitsu thing that has worked fine till
> now running both Win95 and Linux.  It is currently set up as SCSI ID 4.
> I also have a SCSI CDROM on ID 2.  What I would like to do is set the
> machine to boot by default on the 1.2Gb drive into Win95, and use LILO
> on a floppy to boot into Linux, on the second drive.

You can do that.  Alternatively you can use the SCSI card to select 
the OS for you (which is what I do).

> Unfortunately, no matter what I seem to do, the computer wants to boot
> off of the Fujitsu drive, even though it is not bootable (just returns
> an error saying no ROM basic found).
> 
> Can anyone point me to something that says how PCs choose which is the
> bootable drive in a SCSI chain, or point out the bleeding obvious that
> I have somehow missed?

It all depends on your SCSI card.  I own an Adaptec and a Diamond and 
they are both similar.  As the computer is booting they both describe 
a keystroke sequence just after loading their BIOSs (Ctrl-C for the 
Adaptec, Ctrl-A for the Diamond).  This is just after the memory 
check - you can't miss it (unless it's configured not to display a 
message).

These cards then have a set of options on how to configure the card, 
including which scsi id to boot from.  Using this option I can boot 
from any scsi device in my system - including my zip drive (basically 
means I have a 100MB boot floppy  :^)   Using this setup I have the 
nameless OS on one drive and Linux on the other, and I can boot both 
just fine.

So which brand card do you have?  That'll determine how select your 
boot device.

Hope this helps,
Paul


Paul Gearon
gearon at computer.org

Microsoft - Where every morning is the dawn of a new error.