Re: Newbie

[Wayne Knowles <w.knowles%niwa.cri.nz@localhost>]

On Sun, 29 Oct 2000, Collin Baillie wrote:

> Thanks Munehiro. You're a very resourceful person. :)
> 
> If the hard disk *is* dead on this, I assume I can stick a normal scsi disk
> in it and it will work. If it's not the disk does anyone have access to a
> replacement controller/interface card? I'm wondering if it would be the disk
> though. The teacher said it was his 'opinion' that the hard disk needed to
> be replaced. Could replacing a hard disk and reinstalling RISC/OS possibly

Hi Colin,

If you look at it from a probability perspective there is a higher
likelyhood that the disk will fail.  When we had a similar unit in service
with around 8 x 1GB WREN disks we had miliple drive failures an never had
a SCSI controller failure over a 5 year period.

I would assume the unit would have shipped with a QIC-150 or QIC-120 tape
drive for performing the OS install.   You can perform a sprobe from the
monitor prompt to display the SCSI devices.  If you see the QIC-150 tape
drive (it has a vendor name of Archive Viper) then the SCSI controller is
alive - I would bet that is the case.

Based on the information from Munehiro-san it appears that the 3260 is
similar to the 3360 that I have.

The CPU board has a built in NCR SCSI and Lance Ethernet.  The memory is
in a seperate VME slot.

The 3360 also supported the V/Ethernet 4207 "Eagle" VME bus ethernet
controller and the V/SCSI 4210 "Jaguar" SCSI controller.  I have one of
each board along with every peice of technical information a device driver
writer would want to know.  These boards can still be picked up second
hand if you search a little on the web. 

If you can eyeball the machine take a look at the CPU board it should have
a code on it that is visiable from the backplane - it will probably say
RB3125 or similar.

Also, you no longer need any RISC/os to install the NetBSD/mipsco so we
can start to use the OS tapes as our backup media :-)
The only limitation is that the firmware refuses to boot from a RO-disk
(such as a CDROM drive) on the R3000 based machines so you have to install
a installboot image onto a hard disk first.

Wayne
-- 
  _____         Wayne Knowles,  Systems Manager
 / o   \/       National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research Ltd
 \/  v /\       P.O. Box 14-901 Kilbirnie, Wellington, NEW ZEALAND
  `---'         Email:   w.knowles%niwa.cri.nz@localhost