On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, Richard Liang wrote:

>Hi everyone,
>
>The most common failure I get is a message that says
>"(esp0:3:0): selection failed; 0 left in FIFO [intr 18, stat 87, step 3]"
>followed by many
>"esp0: invalid state: 6"

That is the internal hard drive in all likelyhood. As an old 424MB drive, 
it may just be coming to the EOL. While certainly big enough to install 
NetBSD on (I have a full installation on an IPX with the probably the same 
disk type,) it won't be very speedy, especially compared to the 4GB drive.

You may be as well removing it and just using the external drive, as that 
appears to be your preferred drive anyway.

If removing that drive doesn't fix the problem, check ALL termination. 
External terminators can be had quite cheap these days from a computer 
fair or ebay. The drives may well be capable of termination, but that is 
enabled using a jumper. Chances are that the external HD is not 
terminated, as that would limit it's ability to be daisy chained onto a 
SCSI chain (it would need to be the last device.)

Find out what type of drive it is, look up on google which jumper turns on 
termination, and check that it is turned on. It certainly sounds like a 
good old termination problem.

>
>This is often what I get when trying to partition the drive, and sometimes 
>even during the initial stage of installation, when it is detecting all the 
>hardware.  If this happens, if I try to partition again the installer fails 
>to see the hard drives.
>
>When I do a "probe-scsi" in the PROM shell, everything seems to work, but 
>when I do a "test-all" it seems to hang on a line:
>"Testing /obio/zs@0,100000"

May be expecting some loopback device on the serial port for testing.

But if you do have a termination problem, there could be some H/W damage.  
I've seen a SUN mainboard written off due to the EMF resonance (right
phrase?) from an unterminated SCSI bus.

>
>Richard
>

Christian

-- 
"You have not converted a man because you have silenced him." -John Morley

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