[clug] Rescuing old motherboards the hard way

[Paul Wayper]

 Hi people, 
 
 Through a bit of handwaving and vaguery I have found a couple of 
machines in my hands. They're out of warranty, the manufacturer 
doesn't want them back, and they're perfect for an application that I 
have in mind for them. They have no VGA output but can talk through a 
serial console and have USB connectors. They boot off a pair of SATA 
disks RAIDed through an Adaptec board. The frustrating things about 
this are: 
 
 1) No matter what, it seems to either want to boot off the specific 
RAID image or locks up at the "Verify DMI Pool Data......". 
 2) It recognises 'TAB' to go into the console but not Ctrl-A to go 
into the Adaptec configuration. 
 3) The motherboard model (NAMB-6200) is completely unrecognised 
either on the internet or by its (most likely) manufacturer. 
 4) None of the jumpers are documented. 
 
 I'm convinced that there's some clever setting somewhere - a jumper, 
maybe, or a BIOS setting - that stops me installing stuff that the 
manufacturer didn't want me to install on it. Any ideas as to how to 
get around this niggling bit of closed-sourcery would be appreciated 
:-) 
 
 Have fun, 
 
 Paul