Termination and hot-swap backplanes

[Danilo Godec]

Hi there!

I have a brand new machine with an Intel STL2 motherboard, which features
an onboard LVD/SE aic7xxx (LVD and SE are separated connectors), mounted
in an Intel Hudson box with a HS LVD backplane. There is also a factory
provided SCSI cable from the backplane to the motherboard. This cable has
only two connectors and no terminator (at least it's not visible).

The aic7xxx BIOS can see the two disks and can also format them. However,
when I boot to Linux, the driver (it's the 2.2.20 stock aic7xxx driver)
sees the disks, but whenever I try to use them, I get parity errors. I
can't even make partitions on them.

So I replaced the cable with another, this time a much longer, with
multiple connectors and a terminator (I have no spare that would be alike
to the original). Everything works with this cable.

I never before had a problem like that, so I'm a bit affraid that
something is wrong with this backplane.

What if there IS termination on the backplane, but it's not working
properly? I could get a lot of problems later if I use a cable with
termination, right?


    D.


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