Help with a real BeBox

I bought my BeBox 2nd hand, but if I recall some were sold barebones initially, so the hdd doesn’t have to be the original one.

I suppose there must be IDE error messages on the serial port.

Erik38911, what kind of IDE cable are you using? 40 rows or 80?

I replaced the HDD in mine with a CF-card + IDE adapter without any trouble.

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You can find pata dom (parallel ata disk on module) which are pata 40 or 44 pins SSDs.
It is even better than compact flash.

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.

Thanks

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Not sure those cards will work on the BeBox.
You can check the faq for a list of supported cards:
https://web.archive.org/web/19990218150510/http://www.be.com/support/qandas/faqs/faq-0110.html

Thanks! I will look at that!

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.

Hello, @Erik38911! :slight_smile:

This is the Ethernet card (ISA bus) which is installed and working on my BeBox, it has a RTL8019 chip (Realtek card).

20200428_211954
Did you a find a compatible working ethernet card?

Good idea, I was shocked when I booted up my BeBoxen for the first time in years…those SCSI disks are noisy!! :wink:

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 :frowning:

So what network cards will work on a BeBox?

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?

There are some drivers here: http://pulkomandy.tk/~beosarchive/index.pl?search=rtl8139 but I don’t know if one of them has a PowerPC build

Hi,

I have just checked the BeOS documentation.
BeOs supports NE2000 and 3C503 PCI and ISA network card.
Other one might be supported if a driver exists.

I think a few original BeOS drivers sources were published by Be, so it might be possible to compile those if needed.

I just got me a NE2000 ISA card and when it arrived I will try it.

As I got some compiler CDs with the BeBox I could try to compile drivers from source.

I could not find any 3C503 PCI cards and most of the ISA cards don´t have RJ45 connectors.

Strange, but the card with the DEC21041 is working perfectly.

But how do I find out which port and IRQ I need for the ISA card?

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.

So, I need to find a manual for that specific card.

There was a kind of plug & play in the end days of ISA if I´m remembering correctly.

In this case you might need to find a PC with an ISA bus and the proper software to configure the card’s EEPROM…

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).