Very technical question about flashing an IDE device on a SCSI controller

[twilyth]

I have an old IDE ATAPI tape drive that I need to flash. The problem is that the controller shows up as SCSI and instead of being in the IDE/ATA controller section, it appears in the storage controllers section.

The reason it's a problem is because the flash utility needs the address of the device. It's assuming that it is on a standard IDE controller that's part of the motherboard circuitry. As a result, the init file has the standard addresses and interrupts for IDE channels 0-3 (although it only looks at the first 2 by default). The address on the IDE/PCI card though is nowhere near the IDE address block.

For example, the first channel (0:0) has an address of x'01f0'. The other addresses are incremented from there. But the PCI controller's address is DF00 and, according to the OS, isn't even IDE/ATAPI. The device of course is, so in theory it shouldn't matter.

But the other problem is that the flash program also assumes that the first number in the address is '0' and therefore only specifies the last 3 hex digits. If I put in 4 digits, I don't even know if it will work - or worse, overwrite some other part of somebodies bios.

I know I'm screwed but I figured I throw this out for a brain teaser.

 

[Thefumigator]

I would try a normal motherboard, and flash it there. I had a similar problem flashing a BTC DVD combo drive, the flasher was for DOS only, and not windows compatible, so I did had to boot a DOS diskette

For some reason my motherboard didn't supported it or it didn't show up.

So I wen't to my dad's celeron 1100Mhz slot1 system and flashed there with no problem.