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Re: [emax] Problems with IDE to CF adapter and Emax I

2014-07-21 by Ted Summers

If I recall, the applicable version of firmware 3.89 or 6.89 depends upon your board revision.
The board revision is screened onto the board itself.

My board takes the 6.89
Your board revision may not take the 6.89.

DO NOT turn on DMA on the IDE to CF adapter
DMA attempts to make the IDE bus communications faster. Emax has the slowest possible SCSI bus speed.
Anything you do (settings etc) that attempt faster communication between the two buses (IDE to SCSI) may cause errors.

CF cards themselves do not have any DMA settings, they use whatever the bus dictates.

SCSI does not utiltize DMA, which is why you don't have any jumper settings on the SCSI bridge for it.





On Jul 20, 2014, at 9:14 PM, xeelox@... [emax] wrote:


I've got an Acard 7720U REV 3.1 w/ firmware 3.89 and 2 different internal IDE to CF adapters I'm testing with. In Windows I can read/write/format any CF card using either adapter and the 7720U connected to pc SCSI card, but when testing in Emax 1 I get "Hard Drive Error" attempting to format.


- SCSI ID on Acard is 0

- Tried 4 different CF cards between 32-128mb from SanDisk and Toshiba.

- Tried Acard termination on w/ single-device cable, and also off w/ an active terminator on cable.


I attached some LEDs to both the Acard bridge and 1 of the CF adapters (an Addonics bootable, non-hot swap reader). In Windows, both activity LEDs light up during boot & any read/write operations. In Emax, the LED of the Acard and the CF reader only flicker briefly when first powered on, but NEVER blink during an attempted Emax format. It's seems the Emax is having trouble communicating with the SCSI bridge.


According to these previous posts:


https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/emax/conversations/topics/10094 -- Ted said the Acards "don't work unless you have the latest firmware".

Latest ACARD firmware versions 3.89 AND 6.89 were both released on 5/27/2009. Description of each is same, but 6.89 won't install for me.

Q: Can anyone confirm whether 3.89 should be working?


https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/emax/conversations/topics/9277 -- Jammie mentions that "scsi to ide adapters have a delay this sometimes causes a problem"

Q: How would I confirm if this is the cause of my issue?


https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/emax/conversations/topics/7713 -- Jammie asked "have you set the cf card to work with dma? have you set the scsi to ide to use dma?"

Q: Set the CF memory Card to work w/ DMA? Or set the CF Reader to use DMA? My cf reader does have a jumper to enable DMA and it is set. If there's a way to set each CF memory card to work w/ DMA can someone please explain how to do that? Searching turned up nothing.



Q: Regarding setting the Acard to use DMA, how would I do this? Only jumpers on the 7720U are for SCSI ID & Termination. No mention of a DMA setting in user manual. Am I missing something?


Thanks,

Jim




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