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From: jfieber@sophia.smith.edu (J Fieber)
Subject: SOLUTION: Elusive SCSI problem (Adaptec 1542C)
Message-ID: <1993May21.233424.5913@sophia.smith.edu>
Sender: root@sophia.smith.edu (Operator)
Organization: Smith College
Date: Fri, 21 May 1993 23:34:24 GMT
Lines: 63
After spending over two weeks pulling my hair out over flakey
performance from my scsi drives connected to my new 1542C, I have
found the problem (and a solution).
It seems that the localbus ide controller built into the
motherboard doesn't get along with the 1542c. Disabling it makes
all the problems go away. A call to the manufacturer of the
motherboard indicated that the two would most likely never get
along perfectly. The conflict is subtle though; it does not show
up under ms-dos at all and only sporadically under 386bsd.
Since my SCSI devices outnumber my IDE devices 3 to 1, my
solution is to simply sell the IDE drive and replace it with
another SCSI drive.
----
The symptoms (for those who missed it) were:
- All worked well under ms-dos and windows. (apparently at least)
- Under 386bsd I could disklabel and usually newfs the disks but
reading and writing usually ended up with corrupt data and
often a trashed filesystem. However, the scsi tape drive appeared
to work fine.
- Out of desparation I tried NetBSD and Linux (SLS). NetBSD
behaved exactly as 386bsd 0.1 + 0.2.3, no big surprise.
Linux very reliably fell flat on its face every time. This
made debugging much easier since a passed test under 386bsd
did NOT always mean everything was working.
The hardware:
motherboard: UM 486V AIO made by ECS includes:
localbus ide
1 parallel, 2 serial, 1 game
cpu: 486dx33
ram: 8 meg main, 256k cache
video: Orchid fahrenheit 1280 VLB
scsi: Adaptec 1542C with:
Quantum P105S
Quantum PD210S
Archive Viper
----
A **BIG** Thanks to the many people who made suggestions even
though nobody had the right answer. To Nate, I convinced the
place I got the computer that my memory was flakey and a new set
of simms is on its way (free of charge!).
Now that this problem is solved, life can return to normal....
(....famous last words.)
--
=== jfieber@sophia.smith.edu ================================================
======================================= Come up and be a kite! --K. Bush ===