LSI20160 PCI card on netserver e 800???

[sguyana]

I have a netserver e 800. The motherboard has 53C896 chips embedded on it. I have two LSI20160 PCI cards that I want to use on this motherboard, but when I installed them in the PCI slots, the Symbios ROM (upon starting up) doesn't seem to recognize these 2 PCI cards. I tried going into Symbios utility and disable the two built-in SCSI ports (53C896) and reboot the machine, still the Symbios on the PCI cards doesn't "kick in".

Could someone please educate me whether it is possible to have additional SCSI PCI cards on this motherboard? The e 800 motherboard is currently using BIOS version 4.06.18PQ.

The reason I want to use this LSI20160 is because all my HDs are Ultra-160 and the built-in SCSI ports, as my understanding, are just Ultra2.

Thanks! I appreciate a CC: to sguyana@yahoo.com for any reply.

Regards,
sguyana

[Roderick Young]

I saw similar trouble, not on an e800, but on a no-name PC with an LSI plug-in SCSI card.

Be sure to disable the SCSI boot ROM in the BIOS setup. I don't actually know if this is possible, on the e800, but I think on HP machines you press F2 during boot. It may not be enough to disable the SCSI ports in your Symbios utility.

If your LSI card isn't printing a banner (scanning the SCSI bus, etc) during boot, it's possible that the boot ROM on the card itself is disabled. See the LSI website for how to enable it.

If all else fails, you might use the embedded Ultra 2 SCSI just for your boot drive, and use the LSI plug-in card for all your data drives (including swap file), where it will really help performance. You should still be able to load a driver for the LSI card that works once Windows (or whatever your OS) is loaded, even if you can't boot to it.