*BSD News Article 10726


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From: raeburn@athena.mit.edu (Ken Raeburn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Adaptec 1542/386BSD compatible CD-ROM drives
Date: 3 Feb 1993 19:16:05 GMT
Organization: Cygnus Support, Cambridge MA
Lines: 43
Message-ID: <RAEBURN.93Feb3141604@cambridge.cygnus.com>
References: <19581@smoke.brl.mil> <1993Jan21.173539.8390@prepress.com>
	<BLYMN.93Jan25175958@mallee.awadi.com.au>
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In-reply-to: blymn@awadi.com.au's message of 25 Jan 93 17:59:58

In article <BLYMN.93Jan25175958@mallee.awadi.com.au> blymn@awadi.com.au (Brett Lymn) writes:

   >>>>> On Thu, 21 Jan 1993 17:35:39 GMT, bob@prepress.com (Robert Crowe) said:

   R> In article <19581@smoke.brl.mil> lesh@smoke.brl.mil (Steve Lesh) writes:
   >
   >	Any recommendations of CD-ROM drives which work with the Adaptec 1542
   >under 386BSD 0.1 would be appreciated.  (I've already tried one "SCSI" drive
   >which the Adaptec firmware -3.10- would not recognize -- an NEC CDR-25BJ.)

I'm having problems with the NEC CDR-36.

You don't describe just how yours fails, but here's what I see: When
the driver probes the unit number for the CD ROM drive, the red
activity light on the board and the busy light on the drive both come
on, and stay on for over a minute.  The software is not able to access
the drive.  This happens with 386BSD (with Julian's driver), with the
Adaptec DOS software, and with the Adaptec's ROM routines.

The NEC tech support people said it sounded like a termination
problem, but I've tried lots of different things to deal with that,
including adding a pass-through terminator, to no avail.

(They also did say it talks standard SCSI-1.)

The drive works fine under DOS with the Trantor T130 SCSI host adapter
and software that I got with it, but I haven't checked to see if
Julian's drivers work with that card.  I've gotten the impression that
the Trantor card does 8-bit transfers only, so I'd prefer to use the
Adaptec.  On the other hand, it seems this drive wants synchronous
transfer negotiation and parity checking disabled (or that's the
impression I got from the NEC guy), so maybe I should leave it on its
own card.  I have both disabled on my Adaptec card currently.

I tried it on a sparcstation at work, and though it did manage to
print the device id string, it reported lots of parity errors.  I
don't know if it's possible to turn the parity checking off.

I'm going to talk to a local service center and see if I can get them
to make sure it works with the Adaptec before returning it to me...
--
~ Ken Raeburn		preferred: raeburn@cygnus.com	also: raeburn@mit.edu ~
~ Cygnus Support, One Kendall Square, Cambridge MA 02139 USA ~  617-494-1040  ~