Adaptec 2940 cards and Diamond Motherboards

It has been found that when installing Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller cards in Diamond Motherboard based machines that problems can occur.

The symptoms are that the machine may not boot from a cold start, may boot and give memory errors, or may not reboot.

The fix is to make sure that at least v5.06 (or higher) of the Diamond BIOS is installed in the Machine and v1.23 (or higher) of the Adaptec BIOS is in the SCSI Card.

The Diamond BIOS and the Adaptec BIOS are available on the BBS in Area43.

The Diamond BIOS is a Flash BIOS (JFLASH.EXE), but the Adaptec BIOS must be programmed into the chip by a BIOS programmer.

The current version of the Diamond BIOS is v5.07. The file required is either PCW507-4.EXE for machines with the GD5434 video chip or PCW507-6.EXE for machines with the GD5436 video chip.

The current Adaptec BIOS is v1.23 (file name 2940BIOS.BIN). If you do not possess the facilities to program BIOS chips, then please contact Apricot Global Technical Services Department who can program the chips with the latest version at a small administrative cost.

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