Need Help Serveraid II hanging server can't downgrade bios.

[adonis777]

I have a IBM PC 704 server with 256 mb ram 4 ppro system bios @ 1.00.16 with a ServeRaid II card I just ignorantly upgraded from the now need 3.50c bios to 5.11 bios.
Now when I boot the system the server hangs after the raid card posts.
I can't even get to the option of using the 3.50 bios diskette to downgrade the bios and firmware.
I have tried installing the jumper blocks on j11 and rebooting. It says that it is ready to download codeblk via bootblk, but again the system hangs after I get the control i option

If you know a way around this I would greatly appreciate your help.
My head is bloody sore and I don't have much hair left to pull out!
Please save me!
I just bought this Serveraid II card in hopes of getting W2K server installed for my file server.

Thanks!

 

[bonsky]

bro,
i'm really sorry.. but from my experience.. ive done it once also using the latest serveRAID adapter.. but no chance.. so what IBM CE sis was to change the ServeRAID adapter itself.. i guess they themselvesd dont know how to do it...
some more.. 5.11 version has a bit of a problem when it comes to adapter redundancy... so be carefulll it does not support this one... unlike those 4.84.. better... and i find it more stable..

 

[adonis777]

Bonsky

Thx for the technical sympathy!

I am proud to say I fixed it. I had to put my serveraid II adapter in my desktop/server and flash it back to 3.50. My desktop is a AMD 2600 with a Soyo dragon board, so no problems with the large memory blocks.
I installed the raid adapter back in my PC 704 server and installed W2K server with just the drivers provided by microsoft on the installation CD. I didn't need any other IBM drivers.

Had some problems with my server rebooting during the installation process. It was difficult to isolate the problem. I narrowed it done to either a bad/unstable power supply or need to have both power supplies hooked up. I have 8 18.2 gig IBM scsi drive in the box. So I may have needed the extra powersupply.

At the moment my PC 704 server is running with W2K server. Had a drive go defunct on my system array. I put 2 of the 18.2 drives in a raid 1 array. Not sure if it was the control or just the drive died.