[geeks] Tyan Tempest Motherboard Headache

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2018, Mark Benson wrote:

> Any ideas?

Any dinged pins on the LGA sockets?  I had an LGA771 board (a SuperMicro
one, I think) with the same symptom.  With a head-loupe, sharp tweezers,
and a lot of patience, you can fix a few bent pins on LGA sockets.

You may also want to try bringing up the system with a single CPU in order
to update the firmware.   Tyan's page for that board has vanished down the
memory hole, but I do remember needing to update the firmware on my S2696
to get Xeon 5400 support.

Their firmware is still available here:

         ftp://ftp.tyan.com/bios/S2692_v104.zip

Double-check the model number, though.  S2692 was the "Tiger."  S2696 was
the "Tempest."

Be sure that you boot the firmware program from an actual
(34-pin-interfaced) floppy drive with real Microsoft DOS 7 (from Windows
95/98/98SE), and not some USB thing or FreeDOS.

If you need a DOS 7 boot image, I can send one your way.

I tried flashing it from USB, and the flash program bombed midway through,
leaving me needing to buy a replacement EEPROM from MrBios, who are
no-longer in business.  If it fails for you, you'll need to find someone
with an EEPROM programmer who can write the image for you.

The S269x are faithful samples of the last "bad old days" PC hardware,
where front-side buses and BIOS were still around and updating the
firmware of an 8-core 64-bit machine with 64GB of memory meant booting
into 1981.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA