[vortex] 3c905c ROM enable/disable

[Bogdan Costescu]

On 8 Nov 2000 sacrificial-spam-address@horizon.com wrote:

> I recently got frustrated enough with the fact that the network BIOS in
> my 3c905c was delaying the boot sequence all the time to make a DOS boot
> floppy and run 3com's 3c90xcfg.exe. 

I've never seen this (making of a boot floppy from EEPROM) and I have a
lot of 905C cards. However, the main question is: do you want to boot off
the card's EEPROM ? The computers that I bought during the last 6 months
have an option in BIOS that allow to boot from network or not, just like
booting off the floppy, HD or CDROM. I just disable network booting (or
put it lower than floppy/HD) and never bother about EEPROM content.

However, if you need to boot off EEPROM, you'd better rewrite the EEPROM
content; I think that vortex-diag is capable of doing this and the image
can be created with Etherboot.

> There appears to be no checksum.  At least, nothing else changes in
> a corresponding way.

For 905C cards, the checksumming is either strange or non-existent!

Sincerely,

Bogdan Costescu

IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu@IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De