On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 18:37 -0700, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> I'm trying to connect up various MO (magneto-optical) drives to a PC via
> SCSI interface and having consistent problems. The adapter in question is
> an Adaptec AHA-1542CP.
>
> The errors are:
>
> Host adapter status: 00h - No host adapter error
That makes it sound more like a software issue or misconfig with the PC
itself...
> I'm not a total SCSI expert so I'm not figuring this out.
I don't think there's any such thing as a SCSI expert - it never all
quite works as expected :)
> Is there a
> termination issue? As far as I can tell both sides of the chain are
> terminated. The drive is hooked up externally and I'm using an active
> terminator. The host adapter should be terminating internally.
Hmm, do check that the drives don't have their own termination jumper
that's set - having the bus terminated twice at one end could cause all
sorts of problems (and in theory damage devices on the bus, although
I've never seen that happen in practice)
> What generally causes the above errors? I'm getting it on multiple drives
> across multiple adapters.
Are you certain the card(s) and driver(s) are set OK?
eg. under linux I can do:
cat /proc/scsi/sg/host_strs
and get:
Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.8 <Adaptec
29160 Ultra160 SCSI adapter> aic7892: Ultra160 Wide Channel A,
SCSI Id=7, 32/253 SCBs
Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.8 <Adaptec
2940A Ultra SCSI adapter> aic7860: Ultra Single Channel A, SCSI
Id=7, 3/253 SCBs
... so I can tell that the system's talking to the two controllers I
have in this machine, regardless of the state of any connected devices.
Maybe Adaptec have some DOS-based diags you can try by booting from a
floppy.
I have no idea if the 1542 auto-terminates; it's probably too old - but
IME Adaptec's auto-termination sucks and I always set termination for
their boards via jumpers just to be on the safe side.
cheers
Jules
Received on Wed Sep 08 2004 - 05:25:21 BST