Another 2930U problem

[Mark Hounschell]

Bob_Tracy wrote:
> 
> Mark Hounschell wrote:
> >
> > The one consistant thing about it is if I take
> > the Exabyte 8500c tape drive and the Yamaha 8424 off the scsi bus the
> > problem NEVER shows up.
> >
> > The problem is after the download of the sequencer code it gives the
> > following message and just keeps repeating it never continueing on.
> > The first example here is the most common thing that happens.
> >
> > (scsi0) <Adaptec AIC-7860 Ultra SCSI host adapter> found at PCI 0/10/0
> > (scsi0) Narrow Channel, SCSI ID=7, 3/255 SCBs
> > (scsi0) Downloading sequencer code... 422 instructions downloaded
> > scsi0 : Adaptec AHA274x/284x/294x (EISA/VLB/PCI-Fast SCSI) 5.1.31/3.2.4
> >        <Adaptec AIC-7860 Ultra SCSI host adapter>
> > scsi : 1 host.
> > scsi0:0:0:0 Syncronous at 10 mb/sec
> > scsi: aborting command due to timeout pid:0, scsi 0, channel 0, id 0,
> > lun 0, test unit ready 00 00 00 00.
> > sscsi0:0:0:0 Syncronous at 10 mb/sec
> > scsi: aborting command due to timeout pid:0, scsi 0, channel 0, id 0,
> > lun 0, test unit ready 00 00 00 00.
> >       (...)
> >
> > This looks and smells
> > similar to Bob Tracy's problem and definatly like a driver problem to me
> > but maybe someone out there has a similar config (Exabyte tape/ Yamaha
> > CDRW) that has all this working. I sure would like to know...
> 
> This *does* look and smell a lot like what I have been seeing.  The
> above scenario is the *best* result I've been able to get with Linux
> (modulo an "offset 8" on the "Synchronous at 10 mb/sec" line).  The
> controller seems to know that *something* is attached, but that
> "something" never gets identified as a disk, CD-R drive, whatever.
> Win95 works fine, of course, which is the really irritating thing
> about this problem...  That prompted people to suggest checking the
> PnP OS BIOS setting (s/b "no"), and there was also a suggestion to
> force clearing the PCI configuration data (another BIOS setting).
> They caught me on the PnP OS setting :-), but fixing that got me to
> the point you are seeing on the machine above.

I've tried it bothe ways also. For this machine it makes no diff what so
ever what my bios pnp OS setting is.

> 
> The fact that you can get things working by removing devices from
> the SCSI bus is consistent with one of the troubleshooting
> procedures I was asked to try.  In my case, it did no good...
> (What were we trying to identify?  Bad cabling?  A peripheral in
> need of a firmware upgrade?  A pattern of *some* kind?)
> 
> Might sound stupid, but would it be possible in your case to move
> the card to a different slot on your motherboard?  I don't have that
> luxury because of brain-dead component layout on my motherboard: the
> CPU+heatsink+fan combo is directly in front of three of four PCI
> slots, and the 2930U2 is too long to fit in any slot except the
> unblocked one (fourth slot, shared with the first of three ISA slots).
> 

I tried that this weekend. I knew it wouldn't make any difference.
The only difference that made was that now my SB-live was sharing
an IRQ with my video card. Every thing seemed to still work but
they were sharing an IRQ. The scsi problem was still there. I'm
not expert on PC hardware/PCI stuff but to me it doesn't seem possible
that a device on the scsi bus could cause the pci scsi controller to
misbehave with the cpu/mother-brd. Especially since I have 2 machines
doing the same thing. In fact in the machine at home had a tekram
DC-395XX
in it at first and it never showed any problem like I'm seeing now. The
card just died so I replaced it with the same card I used at work. I was
trying to keep the same hardware config between the 2 any way so that I
could interchange the boot disks between the machines when needed.

> My "solution" is to try a Tyan S1590S motherboard, which UPS should be
> delivering in a few days.  The Tyan is a beast of a board with *no*
> built-in disk controllers: AT form factor (case can't take an ATX
> board, and I *really* don't want to replace the case), 4 PCI slots,
> 4 ISA slots, and an AGP slot, none of which are interfered with by
> other board components.  Maximum F.S.B. speed is 100 MHz, but for
> Socket 7 that's fine (I don't overclock).  If this doesn't work, I
> give up :-(.  To think, this all started when I traded a 4.3 GB SCSI-2
> drive and some cash for a WDE 18300 LVD (Ultra-2) drive.  I'm still
> wondering who got the best of that deal :-).

My option for now is to leave the Exabyte and Yamaha off the bus until
I need them. When I do need either one or bothe of them I just reboot
enough times and eventually it will boot up and EVERYTHING will work
fine until the next boot.

I'm still convinced it's a 2930/driver problem.


-- 
Mark Hounschell
dmarkh at cfl.rr.com


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