Re: 3C905C-TX-M Support?

[David Coulthart <davec@columbia.edu>]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Marty Connor wrote:

> On 6/18/2001 4:13 PM David Coulthart davec@columbia.edu wrote:
> > ...  When I flashed the
> >NIC with the Etherboot the BIOS of the machine would list it as an option
> >in the bootup sequence.  With the netboot image I created, only the hard
> >drive & floppy drive were listed as boot options.  If it is possible to
> >get netboot to work with the 3C905C-TX-M, I can provide more information
> >about my environment.
> 
> I think this is probably because your BIOS does not recognize the ROM 
> image as PNP compatible.  See the page:
> 
> What I suspect is that your ROM will have the "Device base type" and 
> "Device interface type" fields swapped.  Try running "disrom.pl" on your 
> netboot image and let us know.
> 
> Ken Yap wrote a program that will easily swap the fields to make ROMs PnP 
> compatible if they have swapped ID bytes.  It's also in the src directory 
> and is called "swapdevids.pl".
> 
> I suspect if you run this on your ROM image, it will become PnP, will 
> appear in your BIOS boot menu, and likely execute.
> 

I tried running disrom.pl on the netboot iamge I created, & you were
correct, the fields were swapped.  I then ran swapdevids.pl on the image &
it corrected the problem.  The output from disrom.pl for the corrected
image now reads as follows:

PCI structure:

Vital product data: 0
Vendor ID: 0x1f
Device ID: 0x03
Device base type: 2
Device sub type: 0
Device interface type: 0
Image length: 32768
Code revision: 0x09
Code type: 0
Indicator: 128

PnP structure:

Vendor: 
Device: Netboot V0.9
Device base type: 2
Device sub type: 0
Device interface type: 0
Device indicator: 0xb4
Boot connection vector: 0000
Disconnect vector: 0000
Bootstrap entry vector: 0x29d
Static resource information vector: 0000
Checksum: 0

ROM checksum: 0 

Unfortunately, however, after I use cromutil to burn the image into the
AT49BV512 chip on my 3C905C-TX-M and reboot the machine, it appears as
though the PROM is completely bypassed when the machine boots up b/c the
machine automatically boots off the hard drive (after checking the floppy
due to the boot sequence).  When looking at the boot sequence in the BIOS
there is no mention of the netboot image on the PROM.

For reference, when creating the netboot image I used all of the defaults
except for choosing that the image would be installed on the network card
& in picking the driver for the card I told makerom to use 3c90xpd.com
with the flag /I=60h & when it asked for the PCI vendor id I gave it 1f
(as reported by cromutil id) & for the PCI devide id I gave it 03 (again,
as reported by cromutil id).  The only other thing of possible relevance
is that when making/installing netboot I removed the second line of
directories from the Makefile line ALL_SUBDIRS, which referred to the
mknbi tools which I had told configure not to build (using
--disable-mknbi-linux, etc.) but still seemed to being built when I would
run make install & would cause the make to exit with an error.  The system
I'm building on is a Redhat 7.0 distribution using gcc 2.96.

If you could help me out with this it would be greatly appreciated,
because although I have the Etherboot menu working, it would require a bit
of work to get the menu to meet my needs & would prefer to use the mgl
menu that was created for our older machines.


Thanks,

David Coulthart
davec@columbia.edu

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