Re: read the eeprom from linux

[Norman Gaywood <norm@turing.une.edu.au>]

On Mon, Jan 08, 2001 at 02:40:00PM +0100, Armin Obersteiner wrote:
> i' like to read the eeprom in my 3Com Corporation 3c905 100BaseTX
> [Boomerang].
> i've ried the etherboot conrib program, but these are for the *b *c
> versions of
> my card. has anybody a working version for this card. [btw i tried the
> others]

Have a look at Donald Beckers stuff at http://www.scyld.com/diag/
You probably want vortex-diag.c 

Speaking of the 3c905, we had 40 of these running with a netboot PROM.
We installed this about 3-4 years(!) ago. Those computers (200Mhz Pentium
2 MMX) were upgraded to some new 733MHz Pentium IIIs. We figured we could
just take out the 3c905s + PROMs and put them in the new machines. But
strange things happen to the ROM address space.

The new machines have a VANTA/TNT 8Mb Video card. With this card
installed, rom-scan reports that the netboot PROM is at CA80:0, is 32K in
size and that the checksum is wrong. With DOS debug, I see the ROM ends
at CA80:17FF.  Thats just over 6K. Of course, when booting with this,
we see the uncompressing message and then a "corrupt DOS" message given
by the BIOS. Also the PROM installed is actually a 27C512 anyway. Not
a 27C256.

But there's more, when we put the old S3 video card in the machine,
the netboot PROM disappears from the memory space totally.

All the diagnostics I can find tell us that the PROM is enabled. This is
using the 3COM setup utility and the vortex-diag.c from Becker. I have
not found anything that will actually set the address of the PROM.

Can anyone make sense of this tale of woe? We are about to give up and
go buy a bunch of NE2000's.

Cheers.
-- 
Norman Gaywood -- School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia
norm@turing.une.edu.au     http://turing.une.edu.au/~norm
Phone: +61 2 6773 2412     Fax: +61 2 6773 3312

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