All,
I am very happy to say I had success with a Seagate Barracuda 4GB drive configured as SCSI 0. It was as easy an install as ever. Boots up, happy, no problems. Thank you all for your help and support! It was a very good feeling to see this machine back up and doing its thing.
As a quick followup, the network card is missing. Does anyone know what chipset (I imagine something very old school) I would want to look at for compatibility? Running R4.
IIRC the Realtec 8139 PCI or any NE2000 PCI cards work without additional drivers. The NE2000 would be limited to Base 10T though I think. You might find a compatible ISA card, but the likelihood of that being a simple plug and play solution is minimal.
I have a feeling my BeBox had some kind of DEC 21040/21041 card.
I wanted to get my BeBox to the network, but this hasn´t worked so far.
I already tried some network cards with RTL8139 chips, but had to find out, that even BeOS 5.0.3 has no driver on the BeBox for it. Are there drivers for it online?
So I got me a DEC 21040. This card is recognized and has a driver, but with it the net_server is constantly crashing because of an unaligned access
I think the RTL8029 (the base 10-T one) worked in mine. I think the BeBox favours ISA cards and I think you might need to jumper them correctly - is it using the right IRQ etc?
I’d assume it would have jumpers to set the IRQ if that was an option. I don’t think any cards that are ISA had any kind of plug and play or auto config. It was all jumpers and scouring manuals back then.
Yes, Plug’n’Play is an ISA thing. The OS must send specific commands to all compatible cards to assign them IRQs and the like. However, if your card is PnP, the OS will take care of it and you don’t have to know the port and IRQ yourself.
If the card isn’t PnP, you have to know, and it’s likely a fixed setting found in the card documentation, or if everything else fails, by scanning all ports and IRQs until you find the right one (resulting in “plug and pray” because it’s likely that you will confuse some other hardware when doing this).