Hello All,

I recently bought a second-hand ISA Adaptec SCSI-controller, and
tried to get it to work with NetBSD on an Intel '486. Installation
and configuration went fine, but when I attached a ZIP-drive to it
and tried to mount it, it failed with `timeout messages' on the 
console. I'm relatively new to the Intel architecture and especially
to Intel combined with SCSI. I checked termination, which seems ok
(I also tried all other illegal termination configs, without any
improvement). Although this machine is running (more-or-less)
NetBSD-current, I don't believe that's the problem.

I'd like to hear from people who use or have used such an adaptec
card with NetBSD, and hear about their experiences. Is this card
known to be problematic (with ZIP-drives, and how about HDD's???),
in general or is the NetBSD-driver for this card troublesome etc...
Could it be an IRQ-thing or... Anyway, I'd like to know which
part of the system to investigate to get this thing to work.
I'd like to know before I try a HDD on it (which I have to buy first).

There was a scary line somewhere in its manual, that stated that
the card would refuse to function with old driver-software in
order to protect your data against it (ARGH!). Could that be
part of the problem, or is it just total nonsense and irrelevant.

{ Feico Dillema,                                                        }
{ University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands }
{ Install NetBSD as first step in your MS-ware 12-step recovery program }