pre10 on a 2940u2w still shows BRKADRINT

[Robert G. Brown]

On Fri, 18 Sep 1998, Neil Conway wrote:

> Robert G. Brown wrote:
> > 
> > I have a pretty good "laboratory" here in that I have a large number of
> > identical systems (Dell Poweredge 2300's with the same CPU, memory, bus,
> > cards, and disks).  As of the linux 5.1.0pre10, I seem to be able to
> > boot and run nearly all of them.  2 out of 16, however, remain
> > incalcitrant and resist my every effort to force them to function.
> 
> Hmm, did you ever get around to swapping disks+RAM etc.?  CPU's even?
> 

I've opened up a couple of them and played games with both cards and
DIMMs (hence I know for sure one of the two systems has at least one bad
DIMM), but I haven't played the game with the CPUs or motherboards
themselves because they are under on site service contracts with Dell
and I'd rather that they did.  I suspect hardware problems, and Dell is
being reasonably open to the possibility, but the one penalty associated
with running !NT with beta-level U2W drivers is that (as I noted) it is
hard for ANYONE to be absolutely sure where a point of failure lies.
Not that it is all that much more certain with NT...

I'm hoping that the hardware person that comes on Monday has software
for really probing the systems.  I've even tried clearing NVRAM and
(presumably) reinitializing the systems to their virginal state with no
success, so hardware is looking better all the time.

> > Looking over the alternatives, I recall that once upon a time Adaptec
> > was rather notorious for sneaking onboard SCSI BIOS revisions into their
> > production line so that a driver would work and then fail.  Is it known
> > that the bios for 7890's has been stable for a while at this point?  I
> > couldn't find anything obvious on their website, but they do have a form
> > that admits the possibility.
> 
> Well an obfuscating factor on Dells (certainly on our 410) is that the
> BIOS is reported as a Dell BIOS revision, not a specific Adaptec one,
> and the numbering appears to be a totally different sequence.  This may
> or may not mean that the BIOS is significantly different from the
> vanilla Adaptec version.
> 
> Do all the machines report the same SCSI BIOS revision at bootup though?

They do, but it is all the Dell number and stuff.  This makes be think
that Adaptec is giving Dell the BIOS code and Dell is doing a bit of an
OEM add-on hack (minimally installing their own logo/revision number,
right?:-) and then flashing the systems.  Hopefully the service rep will
have software for re-flashing the onboard BIOS and the like, in case
that is what is corrupted.

> Sadly, it looks as though I'm not going to get to put Linux on our 2300
> (only a PII-266 but 40GBish of RAID array) as it's been nabbed for
> Netware (!)... Oh well, I'll upgrade it some other time ;-)

It is a really nice box -- when it works.  We haven't built a hot swap
array, but those cute little disk plug-ins are nice even for ordinary
disk, as long as one doesn't mind paying a small premium for the disk.
Well, not so small, actually, but not crazily big either...  I can't
complain because I'm only paying for >>additional<< disk on these gift
horses;-)

   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu




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