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jguerin

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Pro Audio Spectrum 16 Installation Problems

I'm having a problem getting RedHat 5.0 to install on my computer with a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 card with a
SCSI CDROM (Sony CDU561-...). The drive works fine in DOS, but when I try to install RH5, it tends to freeze my computer after I tell it to autoprobe the system with the PAS16 SCSI CDROM module. Note that there are no jumpers to choose the base address of the SCSI port or the IRQ that it should use on the card itself. The Trantor driver for DOS says that the SCSI base address is 388h, but it doesn't mention an IRQ (does it use one?). Basically I'd like some advice as to how to get RH to install without freezing after it supposedly detects the CDROM. It sounds like some kind of conflict to me, but... conflicting with what? All I have in the machine is a video card, PAS16 card, and a 1 port IDE interface card for the HD.

Jon Guerin
jguerin@home.com
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jhance

I tried for a very long time to use my PAS16 with SCSI devices under Linux.  It doesn't have an IRQ and so the driver must poll the card to determine if a command has finished.  First of all, this is really slow.  Second, I don't think the driver has received much attention due to the ready availabilty of low cost full featured SCSI cards from Adaptec and others.  It's just not robust hangs a lot.  I pulled the PAS16 card and dropped in an Adaptec 1510 that I bought for US$15 and I haven't had a single problem since then.
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ASKER

  Well thanks for the advice, I figured as much as that. I first thought it was conflicting IRQs but I couldn't figure out what it would be conflicting with, no surprise that one doesn't exist for it. So that leaves me with the base address.
   First of all, Mediavision (the creators of PAS16) ate it hard and went out of business, probably due to their *AWESOME* foresight (sarcastic) that they put into products like this that don't let you change the base address for the SCSI on the card, am I right?
   I'm probably going to go out and buy a new SCSI adapter like jhance suggested, but I'd still like an answer to this question due to the fact that 1) I've met people on IRC who've gotten it to work, and 2) If I go out and buy a new SCSI card, I'm still going to have this one laying around, and since I've got ANOTHER motherboard and chip sitting right here in front of me I'd like to setup another computer with it.
   I know somebody out there has an answer, as the PAS16 was a pretty popular board back in its day. Surely SOMEBODY out there has tried to rebuild an old PC and stick RedHat linux on it with a PAS16 board in it. Since I have nothing else in this computer I'm sure that this is not just an isolated incident.
   Thanks again.
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aszure

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