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Home / WebSurfer Areas / WebSurfer Technical Stuff Stop pulling out your Disk-On-Chips! You silly, silly folks!

Stop pulling out your Disk-On-Chips! (modified 0 times) Corporal Clegg Why is everyone pulling out their DoC's (Disc-On-Chip's) out in the first place? You don't need to remove the chip in order to boot from an IDE controller card! Just make sure that you've gone into your Bios (by holding down delete during boot-up), go into the "Integrated Perephrials" menu, and disabling the "Primary IDE Channel". Special Note: You can still boot into QNX after the Primary IDE Channel is disabled, which leads me to believe that you will eventually be able to access it as well, even with the IDE connected. If you can access it, you should be able to overwrite it, and add linux, which can then boot off of a nfs partition over a network. 04-28-2000 19:04:38

RE:Stop pulling out your Disk-On-Chips! (modified 0 times) Beeblebrox I did make that BIOS setting change and my drive still wouldn't boot (SCSI card). After popping out the DOC, it booted fine. 04-28-2000 21:14:24

RE:Stop pulling out your Disk-On-Chips! (modified 0 times) pofig37 Just beacuse SanDisk in IO uses IDE interface, it doesn't mean that DiskOnChip does. Although M-sys makes a version of DOC with IDE interface, the DOC in WebSurfer is NOT IDE and doesn't not show up as a disk in the BIOS. From the instructions on M-sys website, it appears that to boot from DOC you have to flash a certain firmware into it which conflicts with the normal booting off a harddrive. That's why the chip needs to be removed. By flashing different firmware into DOC you should be able make it work with another drive. Then you can use M-Sys drivers to accessing DOC filesystems under WinNT and Linux. 04-28-2000 22:12:50

RE:Stop pulling out your Disk-On-Chips! (modified 0 times) codeman if your having booting problems with a scsi card change the bios address on you scsi card or the doc address on the ws using jp1 a,b its default add is D000 the address are listed on the mb to the left of the ide header.. codeman 04-28-2000 22:25:19

RE:Stop pulling out your Disk-On-Chips! (modified 0 times) trout I tried all the settings on jp1 like codeman suggested and tried all the i/0 settings on the scsi card, but I had no luck. It still booted from the DoC, and when the scsi card was in the system the websurfer graphics were all messed up. I couldn't see the cursor or any text. When I pulled the DoC, it booted from the scsi disk fine. Both scsi cards were pci, a DPT and a symbios. Has anyone got a scsi card to boot with the DoC in place? How about sharing any IDE cards that are known to work with the DoC? I really want to get this working as the plan is to boot linux off the DoC and run this thing without a hard drive. I'm toying with the idea of pulling the chip, booting up dos, replacing the chip, and using the m-systems utilities to get the DoC ready for linux, a la the i-opener bios swapping trick. Has anyone tried this, or know for sure that this would be a really bad idea? Trout 04-29-2000 01:23:48

RE:Stop pulling out your Disk-On-Chips! (modified 0 times) Dr. Ion Trout: Sounds like an excellent idea to me. You'll have to insert the chip "hot", which isn't totally safe. Normally, you want to apply power to the chip before driving the addr/data lines. But in the real world, if you slam the whole chip into place at once, it rarely has a chance to do anything destructive. While the Iopener made it easy to dabble around in QNX, this one is a little more opaque. If we can get a QNX image off it and dissect it, there might be a lot more to do with this box as-is. For anyone that hasn't yet.. go over to www.m-sys.com and read up on the DiskOnChip2000, your new friend. There are app-notes there on making it a Linux boot disk, as well as using it in QNX. It's a neat idea... it pretends to be a boot BIOS (like LAN cards and SCSI cards), and then loads special BIOS code to simulate a drive filesystem on its flash memory. Cute, but not as simple as the SanDisk IDE-simulating flash in the iOpener. 04-29-2000 01:39:20

RE:Stop pulling out your Disk-On-Chips! (modified 0 times) Dr. Ion Trout: Sounds like an excellent idea to me. You'll have to insert the chip "hot", which isn't totally safe. Normally, you want to apply power to the chip before driving the addr/data lines. But in the real world, if you slam the whole chip into place at once, it rarely has a chance to do anything destructive. While the Iopener made it easy to dabble around in QNX, this one is a little more opaque. If we can get a QNX image off it and dissect it, there might be a lot more to do with this box as-is. For anyone that hasn't yet.. go over to www.m-sys.com and read up on the DiskOnChip2000, your new friend. There are app-notes there on making it a Linux boot disk, as well as using it in QNX. It's a neat idea... it pretends to be a boot BIOS (like LAN cards and SCSI cards), and then loads special BIOS code to simulate a drive filesystem on its flash memory. Cute, but not as simple as the SanDisk IDE-simulating flash in the iOpener. 04-29-2000 01:39:20

RE:Stop pulling out your Disk-On-Chips! (modified 0 times) hardware1 You do need to remove it, remember how it goes back in! Put a mark on it or something. It loads sort of like a video driver BIOS, it loads stuff into RAM at boot to simulate a drive. This is why you need to remove it if you are having problems booting. You can always put it back. 04-29-2000 02:47:47

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