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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.uoknor.edu!news.nodak.edu!netnews1.nwnet.net!imci4!newsfeed.internetmci.com!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!psgrain!iafrica.com!xwing.wcape.gov.za!swhite From: swhite@xwing.wcape.gov.za (Sean White) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: SCSI bus hangs - AIC7870 Date: 16 Mar 1996 19:39:22 GMT Organization: Internet Africa Lines: 53 Message-ID: <4if5db$bl8@newnews.iafrica.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: xwing.wcape.gov.za X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Hiya! First, a word of thanks to Stefan Esser who helped me sort out the PCI problem I had on the Acer 7000/V machine that I run FreeBSD on. If anyone wants the solution, please mail me. Now, I wonder if anyone can help me with another problem that I'm having at the moment, namely what appears to be SCSI bus hangs. Here's the story. The Acer machine has an Adaptec AIC7870 controller built in on the motherboard, and it resides on the PCI bus. There are two SCSI ports on the motherboard, a normal one and a wide one. Not having any wide devices, the wide connector is unused. On the other port, I have three devices. A Seagate 4GB HAWK drive as device 0, a Sony SDT-4000E DAT drive as device 1 and a Matsushita CR504 quad-speed CDROM as device 3. All the devices are seen and work just fine, except for the DAT drive which, when used, causes the SCSI bus hang and locks the system up. I found that setting the TAPE environment variable to /dev/nrst0 allows me to write to and read from the drive with no hassles but, if the last write (say, using tar to backup the disk) was a long one, then an 'mt rewind' locks it up. I've noticed that the activity light on the controller (LED wired to the motherboard) stays on solid when DAT accesses are made. As a test, I yanked the Hawk and the DAT out of the machine and plugged them into a different system that has an Adaptec 2742 controller (uses AIC7770) installed and the whole lot worked 100%, with the exception of 'mt erase' which also caused a SCSI hang. Now, the people who assembled this machine don't seem to have much of a clue about SCSI termination - I found the disk and the CDROM both had terminators enabled which is an obvious no-no but I don't have the manual for the DAT drive (Yet! A nasty letter was sent...) and I can't check whether or not they've been incredibly stupid or just stupid. Would termination on the DAT cause such behaviour and, if so, why does it seem to operate more reliably on the 2742? If not, any ideas where else I can look? BTW, both machines, along with all the others in the room, run FreeBSD 2.1-RELEASE with no problems, even the silly little 486dx2/66 in the corner with 450MB IDE drive which I use for a WWW proxy. This Acer is the only problem child in the lot. Oh, just as an aside, does anyone know if there's such a thing as a DAT drive that will also playback (record would be nice too!) audio DAT tapes instead of just being DDS devices? Y'know, like CDROM drives also play audio CD's? :) Regards, - Sean.