[ On , September 21, 1998 at 23:33:17 (-0400), Paul F. Wells wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Is it really the disk drive or something else?
>
> The drive is the only scsi device and it's internal; the only jumper
> I had to fiddle was the motor start so it would spin up on the 386 boxes.
> I replaced it when I put the drive back into the sparc.  It's been a while
> since the drive has been outside of the sparc and I don't recall its
> termination state.  I can check again.

My recollection is that the internal drives should be terminated.  I've
got all my disks in an external enclosure.  Surprisingly I'm getting by
with just a normal passive terminator, and I've got probably the maximum
length of cable on the bus too (3m).

Internal drives must be connected by a cable no more than 30cm and no
less than 10cm in length, with the 10cm length being preferred.

If you have all original Sun hardware then you should be OK on that
front, provided it's in good condition.

Do check the termination....

Speaking of motor start though....  You might want to jumper the drive
so that it spins up on power-up.  I've got one drive in my system that
seems to be set to spin up only on demand, and though the initial SCSI
bus reset and probe seems to spin it up, I'm not 100% certain all
versions of SS2 firmware will do this successfully.

If you have some way of connecting the drive externally you might try
that too.  This will eliminate stress on the internal power supply,
which may also be a factor.  (note that the external bus must definitely
be terminated if there's anything on it)

> Sure, in fact, I should have tried to load windows or something on the
> 'failing' disk but didn't...I can try that later.

That would be a half decent test, I suppose.

How about loading NetBSD/i386 on it instead!  Even booting NetBSD/i386
from floppy and playing around on the drive (create partitions and
filesystems, reboot and cycle power, then copy files from the floppy to
the disk, etc.) should be a good test.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
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