Re: Seagate Baraccuda drives and Adapetc AHA1460 controller prob.

[Bill Leach <bleach@bellsouth.net>]

Stephen, has cfdisk complained after the first time you set up the drive
(the first time would have been ok since there was not a DOS/PC sort of
partition table on the drive)?

I am 'just clutching at straws here' but in the past there have been
some drives that 'lie' to the SCSI bus about their capability during the
scsi inquire.  Some of these things typically 'hang' the scsi bus
(requiring a time out/reset) but others could be 'partially implemented'
or at least implemented in such a manner that the driver/interface can
not handle.  I would suggest disabling 'disconnect/reconnect' or
'Synchronous SCSI' and see if that helps.

Also, another problem that I have experienced on other machines is that
there were some disagreements as to exactly what the standard meant in
determining the size of the scsi inquire response message and depending
up just exactly how both the drive and the scsi driver software handled
this matter it was possible for the driver to mix some drive
specifications in a multi-drive situation (please recognize that this is
a problem that can involve the scsi interface ROM as well as say the
Linux drivers).

In any event, the way to 'get around' a problem caused by this
particular problem is to change the scis ID order of the drives.  Doing
this is, of course, a horrible 'pain' under Linux.  I would suggest that
if you want to try to see if your problem with this drive is related to
this ID order sensitive problem, that you install just this one drive
from the Sparc (unplug your other drives--don't forget termination) and
install debian on that drive to test its' performance.



-- 
best,
-bill
      bleach@BellSouth.net  b.leach@Worldnet.att.net
           b.leach@usa.net  LinuxPC@Hotmail.com
from a 1996 Micro$loth ad campaign:
"The less you know about computers the more you want Micro$oft!"
         See!  They do get some things right!


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