aic7880 problem talking to CD-R

[Michael Poole]

	I have an Asus P2L97-DS motherboard with an onboard AIC-7880 and a
Matsushita CW-7502 CD-R (I believe the same drive is also sold under the
Panasonic brand name, with the same model name/number).  Under
Linux-2.1.89-pre3 with aic7xxx-5.0.7, Linux-2.0.32 with aic7xxx-5.0.7, and
Linux-2.0.32 with the aic7xxx that comes with RedHat 5 (I believe it's
3.0.2), I am unable to boot Linux with the CD-R on the SCSI chain.  Under
NT 5.0 beta 1, I can boot, but there are delays of 5 seconds every 20 or
30 seconds after it boots.

	The CD-R is a SCSI-2 (at least, I think SCSI-2) narrow drive which
is attached to a narrow connector on the motherboard, along with a CD-ROM
which works.  There's also a wide connector on the motherboard, connected
to several hard drives, and termination is set properly (at both ends of
the chain and at the high byte on the motherboard).  The symptoms I
observe are the same regardless of whether or not any other devices are on
the bus -- I've tried without the CD-ROM, without the hard drives, and
without either (only the CD-R on the bus).

	The RedHat aic7xxx driver with kernel 2.0.32 is the most verbose
when the error occurs; under aic7xxx-5.0.7, I get one line:
scsi0: Target 5, channel A, refusing WIDE negotiation; using 8 bit
transfers.
(or something to that effect) and then the machine just sits there.  With
the RedHat-supplied aic7xxx driver, I get that line, plus:
scsi0: Channel reset, sequencer restarted
(scsi0:5:0) Aborting scb 0
(and more errors about Abort_Reset messages from device 5, which is the
CD-R; they scroll rather quickly, but if they'd be helpful, I can copy
them down verbatim), and then something about trying harder to reset; the 
messages repeat.

	If that were the extent of my experience with the drive, I'd chalk
it up to a flakey CD-R.  However, the drive did work and has been used to
burn CDs in a (different) Windows 95 machine using an AHA-2940
dual-channel narrow SCSI-2 controller without any difficulties setting it
up.  The only real difference I notice between the two (unless the chipset
is different in some way I don't know about) is that my motherboard
supports wide SCSI and is using it and the other machine is narrow-only.

	Does anyone have suggestions as to what I can try to do to make
this work, or at least find out if it's a problem with the CD-R's firmware
and I should scream at Matsushita/Panasonic?

Many thanks in advance,
Michael Poole


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