Crash/Reboot with Adaptec 3940UW

[Ivan Kohler]

I am using 3940s (specifically, two 3940UWs and a 3940AUW).  I don't think
all 3940s are broken.  On the other hand, had I not watched a hang-on-boot
problem follow a card between several machines (but only with 2.2.10
kernel - the "broken" card worked fine with 2.2.7 kernels), I may not have
sent it back and gotten a working one.

On Mon, Jul 05, 1999 at 09:00:32AM +0100, Nick Taylor wrote:
> Hi
> 
> This sounds suspiciously like the problem that I have been having with 3940s. I believe that
> the current aic drivers are broken for 3940s - As soon as I try to use 2 hds at the same time
> (either on the same or different channels) my machine hangs. I am currently using only one
> drive on the 3940 and the others on a 2940 which is fine.
> 
> Hoping for someone to address this problem soon.
> 
> Nick
> ----
> 
> Jeffrey Veiss wrote:
> 
> > Calling all SCSI experts:
> >
> > I have a bit of a challenge with an Adaptec 3940UW SCSI card.  To start off,
> > here's the specs:
> >
> >    Tyan Trinity 1590 Motherboard v1.16
> >    AMD K6 233MHz CPU
> >    128M SDRAM
> >    Windows 98 loaded on a Western Digital 4G EIDE drive (4 part VFAT)
> >    Redhat 6 loaded on Seagate Cheetah (3 part VFAT, 4 part ext2, 1 part swap)
> >    See below for more info
> >
> > The Problem:
> >
> >    I was happily computing along, backing up my laptop to the /home partition
> >    on the above machine (hostname = fuzzy) using rdist when fuzzy restarted.
> >    This happened three times before I decided to do something else and work
> >    on why later.  The next day (I don't remember what i was doing), fuzzy
> >    was rebooting into linux and needed to fsck the / partition (sda5).  As
> >    it was trying to fsck, it crashed/rebooted with no errors.  Every reboot
> >    has the same result.  The only major change to the system was a
> >    motherboard BIOS update.
> >
> >
> > Things I tried:
> >
> >    o Booting from Slackware 3.5 SCSI boot/rescue root floppies and running
> >      fsck on sda5.
> >
> >    o Booting from Slackware 4.0 aic7xxx boot/rescue root floppies and running
> >      fsck on sda5.
> >
> >    o When booting/rooting from floppy, I can mount sda5 but if I poke
> >      around too much (cd's & ls's), it eventually crashes/reboots.
> >
> >    o I can fsck the other ext2 sda* partitions, but poking around too much
> >      eventually crashes/reboots (tar'ing each partition causes a crash).
> >
> >    o Tar'ing a CD from either CD-ROM drive doesn't cause a crash.
> >
> >    o Setting Bus A termination to Disabled and Bus B termination to Enabled.
> >
> >    o I booted with aic7xxx=panic_on_abort,verbose and it still rebooted.
> >
> >    o I downgraded the motherboard BIOS to the original version and it still
> >      crashes.
> >
> >    o Windows 98 (scarily enough) works fine.  I did a thorough scandisk on
> >      all EIDE & SCSI partitions with no problem.  Both CD-ROM's work fine.
> >
> >    o The cheetah was repartitioned and installed with Redhat 6 a few weeks ago
> >      and except when I had to turn off wide negotiation on the CD-ROM and Zip
> >      drives, has been working fine.
> >
> > At this point, I'm at a loss as to what to try next.  Possibilities include
> > hardware failure on either the SCSI Card or Seagate Cheetah or a SCSI BIOS
> > mis-configuration, but then why does Windows 98 work?  (No really, why
> > does Windows 98 work? :-)  )
> >
> > Any assistance would be gratefully appreciated!
> >
> > Please contact me if there are any further questions via internet mail at
> > jsv at sirveiss.com.  Thank you very much!
> >
> > Jeffrey Veiss (jsv at NOSPAMsirveiss.com)      13 Lynn Court
> > Network Engineer/System Administrator       Somerville, NJ 08876
> > Sir Veiss, Inc.                             (908) 431-1318
> >
> > ----------------------------------------
> > Here's some other useful info:
> >
> > Significant IRQ's:
> >
> >  3     COM2
> >  4     COM1
> >  5 IDE Creative Labs AWE32
> >  7 PCI Adaptec AHA-3940 Ultra/Ultra Wide v1.25
> > 10 PCI Adaptec AHA-3940 Ultra/Ultra Wide v1.25
> > 11 PCI 3Com Fast Ethernet
> > 14     Enhanced IDE Bus
> > 15     USB
> > NA PCI Creative Labs Voodoo 2


----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Ivan Kohler <ivan at iqualify.com>


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