Need boot ROM for Asus A7M266-D motherboard

Donald Becker becker at scyld.com
Tue Dec 10 19:32:31 PST 2002


On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Jack Wathey wrote:

> A friend and I are hoping to build a diskless cluster of dual Athlons
> using Asus A7M266-D motherboards.  This board is sometimes sold as
> model A7M266-DL, which is just the A7M266-D bundled with a 3Com 100
> Mbps NIC, model PCI-L3C920.  According to 3com, the chipset on this
> little NIC is intended for use as an integrated LAN interface on
> the motherboard.  Asus chose to put it on a tiny PCI card instead.

Pay attention to the warning never to use this card on another
motherboard... 

> We need to boot these machines over the net using PXE boot.
> Unfortunately, the A7M266-DL bundle does not include a boot ROM,
> although the NIC has a socket for one, and the manual says that one

Get a 29 series Flash chip of the right pin count.
A likely part is the Atmel AT29c010 128Kx8, which was the recommended
part for earlier boards.

> 3com and Asus, I have not yet found anyone who can tell me the part
> number and how to get the boot ROM chip for this NIC.

Very few people do know...

> Any suggestions for alternative NICs that might work for us?  We
> would also welcome suggestions for alternative dual Athlon boards
> that support WOL and have on-board 100 Mbps LAN (other than Tyan and
> Gigabyte, which we have already tried and found inadequate for our
> purposes).

I'm curious: those are the two main players, what was lacking?

-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Scyld Beowulf cluster system
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993




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