[ale] Adaptec 2940UW bios updates

[Jim Seymour]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 09:16:46PM -0500, Stephan Uphoff wrote:
> Jim Seymour wrote:
> 
> > I am having some major stability problems after building the new system 
> > and was looking to cover all the bases.
> 
> If you think this is SCSI drive related (any error message?)
> look at the following:
> 
> 	- Check for correct SCSI bus termination (both sides)
> 	- Card should supply termination power
> 	- Ancient cables and high transfer speeds do not mix.
>           ( Change cables or set reduced transfer speeds)
> 	- Check for correct SCSI bus termination (both sides)
> 	- Tagged queuing and old drives can be a problem.
>           (disable tagged queuing or update drive firmware) 
> 	- Check for correct SCSI bus termination (both sides)

Thanks Stephan,
	I have no reason to suspect scsi other than "something" is 
wrong. The scsi adapter, drives and cables were removed from my old 
system and dropped right into this one without changing boot 
order or any of the cards settings. Basically the system will lock up 
sometimes when it is idle with the screensaver running. Programs will 
die unexpectedly and often the system will not respond to any requests 
at that point. Just now it locked up leaving the keyboard lights 
flashing. That happened while navigating my Mozilla bookmarks. 
Sometimes I will get kernel panics. It was suggested that I try the 
memtest86 program from a boot disk. I will get a huge number of errors 
in a row at the end of test #5 and the start of #6. The motherboard is 
set to automatically set the correct memory timings. Funny thing the 
motherboard reports the fsb at 200MHz while Linux reports it at 333MHz. 
Every time I've tried to manually set the correct fsb the system just 
continuously beeps and will not boot. I am sending a message to Asus 
support to see if there might be anything there.

Thanks,
Jim