Release Notes for:

Firmware 4.06-0-8

BIOS 4.10-38

Firmware Changes 4.06-0-00 to 4.06-0-08

Added logic for a SCSI retry when a device gives a Busy Status or if the automation value of the Interrupt Status is "No Message After Status". This was done to give the drives an additional chance before taking them Offline.
On spanned drives, the System Drive is now marked as "initialized" only when all of the Packs in the Span have been initialized. Previously, a Spanned Drive may have been marked as initialized when a Rebuild completed on one of the Packs. This was done to make sure that all of the System drives on a Spanned Array are initialized and will pass a Consistency Check.
Fixed problem where Netware System sometimes locked up when an attempt was made to "add capacity".
Fixed problem where a Standby Rebuild was delayed while a Background Initialization was running.
Fixed the problem of a long pause seen during system power up where too much time was given for each drive to respond .
Fixed problem where Netware System crashed when the DAC960 Administration Utility (DACADM.NLM) was run and "Make Standby" was selected.
Added a delay mechanism for legacy Disk Cabinets that issue a SCSI Bus Reset when a drive is inserted or removed. This caused one or more drives to be marked Offline.
Fix made for problem seen where an Automatic Rebuild did not occur if a Standby drive was Offline and another drive replaced it.
Enhancement made to restart drives to recover from any additional resets that occurred when the controller was already in a recovery process. Previously, this could cause drives to be marked as not startable and taken Offline.
Fixed problem seen where the Hot Swap removal of an Offline drive would sometimes cause another drive to be marked Offline.
Fixed a problem sometimes seen where a drive that should have been shown as Offline and part of an array was instead shown as RDY by the Mylex configuration utility DACCF.
The DAC controller was changed to issue a reset when there is no Message In following the SCSI Status Phase in a drive. This was done to put the SCSI data pointer on track for the current command and not the previous command. This was later changed in 4.06-0-08 b00.
Fixed problem seen where GAM would not scan the controller if there wasn't a SAFTE or StorageWorks backplane. Drives that were taken Offline were not displayed.
Fixed a problem that was seen when Expanding Capacity with MORE. If there was a media error on one of the drives in an area that is used to prevent any loss of data, the Expand Capacity would hang. After a reboot, the operation would continue without errors or loss of data.
Fixed a problem with some harddrives where heavy I/O would cause the DAC to issue SCSI Bus Resets which slowed down performance.
The DAC Controller would hang if a Media Error was found in one of the drives and the drive’s Request Sense data contained an LBA number that was not part of the original operation (Invalid LBA number). The Error Recovery algorithm has been changed to handle this type of situation.
A Consistency Check would fail after the completion of a Background Initialization (Part of the Immediate RAID Availability feature). This occurred if the system had been subjected to several reboots during the Background Initialize process. This has been fixed.
When the DAC controller was configured at the factory to boot up in a Critical State when there is a missing drive, the following would occur: GAM would display the drive as Unconfigured and the GAM Server would get into a loop of scanning the SCSI bus over and over again.
Fixed a timing problem that resulted in the GAM client sometimes displaying a "Rebuild Cancelled" message.
When rebuilding a Raid 1 system drive, if a medium error was encountered on the Online physical drive, the Bad Data Table was not getting updated. This has been fixed.

 

BIOS Changes 4.10-27 to 4.10-38

Fixed a hang seen on some systems during the system power up if the first command from the system was a reset to the DAC960 BIOS.
Delay for the escape sequence <alt>m to enter Mylex utility menu has been set to 5 seconds during power up.
The BIOS Read and Write performance has been improved.
After several hundred warm reboots (or around 60 hrs), on one vendor's system the BIOS would hang during POST at the message "8gb Bios Enabled". This was caused by the vendor's system BIOS corrupting the FS register.
The BIOS was enhanced to support extended INT13 calls for disk devices. This was necessary to pass Microsoft Windows NT HCT tests.
The second reboot during the installation of Windows 95/98 caused a General Protection Fault. The BIOS was changed to support Windows 95 switching between Real and Protected mode during installation of the Operating System.
Introduced boot up option to enable the BIOS Configuration Utility (BCU). A user can depress <ALT> R for the specific controller from which the BCU will be loaded. This option has been introduced to give the user immediate access to the BCU and as a workaround for problems starting the BCU on some Systems.
Fixed problem that some old system BIOS’s have de-allocating XBDA memory. This had resulted in the system not booting.
The option to configure MDAC has been removed from the BIOS menu. The "configure" option can now be selected directly by pressing <ALT>R on power up.
Changed BIOS size to 12K to solve compatibility problem with some systems.
Change added to begin firmware routines for multiple controllers concurrently.