OK: Sometimes I can see why people hate scsi...

Santilli

Hairy Aussie
Joined
Jan 27, 2002
Messages
5,273
After a wonderful day at the office, I came home to a non-booting, SO computer.

Pop in XP disk, try and boot from that. Forget I have to switch from the wireless keyboard and mouse, to the wired stuff. Find SCSI LSI drivers floppy. Do that, and, after a few, "windows does not detect any disks" messages, I F6, install the scsi driver,
and still get no disks present.

That means it's most likely hardware, and, the first place to look is the wonderful scsi 68 pin to 80 pin adapter. I'm using a spare 36 gig cheetah for a boot drive, but, it was orginally going to go in my SCA box. Now, it's the boot drive for the SO's. What happens with the adapters is you have to string the scsi cable over a something above the drive, drop the cable down, and connect. If you don't, over time, the adapter works it's way off the drive, even if you don't move or open the machine. This has happened on both machines I've used such adapters for.

After stringing the cable properly, and connecting the maxtor storage drive, copying the My documents folder over to it for backup, I start checking drive speed. On boot, I'm not getting the LSI logic message that the drive should work at 160 speeds. I install ATTO, and it shows the drive working at Wide, or 8 bit, data speed.
I enter the LSI Logic utility, putz around until I get to the drive menu, and change the value from 8 to 16. Reboot, get the right message, and we are back up and moving quickly. Keep in mind, for about 2 weeks, I've been thinking the SO installed something that got a virus on the machine, or something, that really was screwing up the speed of the computer.
I was wondering why a Athlon 3000+ was so slow, and, waol.exe would, on occassion, take 100% of the processor, so, I thought we had a worm, or virus. No, it's just AOL sucks.
Since the machine is rarely rebooted by me, I never saw the LSI boot screen, and the lack of SCSI 160 speed, or 8 bit, wide going on.
Sure, the machine works at wide speeds, but, it feels kind of slugish, like it had a 7200 rpm ide boot drive, or worse. :twistd:

Now it's up, the data is backed up to the Maxtor 160 gig I forgot I put in the machine as a backup drive, with the power disconnected, and all is fun and giggles.

Scsi kind of reminds me of a complex puzzle sometimes, and, if you aren't playing the puzzle all the time, it may take a long time to figure out what's wrong. Since these machines are becoming more reliable, I have to screw with them less, and, when I have a scsi problem, it takes awhile to remember the trouble shooting sequence. I can see why some guys like IDE, and SATA, now that they, at least in sustained transfer speeds, are right on the heels of scsi drives.

Greg
 
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