#Hard drive lockup?
8 messages in this thread
I am having problems with my hard drive locking up when I boot.
I installed a Maxtor 7345SR SCSI hard drive into my A3000. Now I am having
problems with my primary 105 meg Quantum. The drive was working fine together
with the Maxtor for a couple of days before the Quantum locked up.
I am only able to get through the compete boot process about 1 in 20 tries.
The drive LED just stops flickering and goes on full. Often I get a checksum
error on the Quantum. This didn't happen before I installed the Maxtor. I had
this problem with another Maxtor so I got the dealer to give me a replacement.
Now it is happening again.
It seems like the drive locks up during heavy disk usage. Is there some
problem with the A3000 controller or maybe the scsi.device software? I have
Kickstart version 37.310. Workbench version 38.12.
Any suggestions?
-Jerry
Jerry,
This may be obvious, but are you sure you don't have both drives set
for the same scsi ID? It "sounds" like the two drives are in contention on the
buss, which is often caused if they have the same ID. Otherwise, the problem
could be termination. If each drive is set to a different scsi ID, then be
sure that the LAST drive on the chain is terminated, but the first one is not.
If you don't know what I mean by termination, look just behind the 50 pin
connector on the drive and you should find two or three resistor packs side by
side in sockets. To unterminate a drive carefully remove the resistor packs
(but put them away somewhere in case you ever need them).
In case no one else has asked yet.
First, how are the drives installed, one inside and one external? Or both
drives mounted internally?
Second, which drives are terminated in relationship to the ends of the
cable? Normally the last device on each the end of the SCSI cable is
terminated and any other devices are not trminated.
Last have you tried turning off reselection on both drives?
//
\X/ Amiga or bust! Gary Bonnstetter, Bonnsoft
I finally got the Maxtor to work. I swapped drives. The Maxtor didn't
like being on the long end of the cable or being the second device maybe.
Wasn't a termination problem (this time!).
So, if anyone is having a problem with a Maxtor, this might be something
to try.
BTW, What is reselection and how do I turn it off?
Thanks,
-Jerry
Interesting experience you have had there. I thought that sort of
peculiarity was restricted to IDE drives.
I installed a Maxtor 7345A in a friend's 486 machine in addition to the
Seagate 120M that was already present. I could not get the machine to
boot off the Maxtor and still recognize the Seagate. I gave up and set
everything up to use the Seagate as the boot drive and the Maxtor as the
second IDE drive in the system and everything works great.
Similarly, I have another friend who tried to put a Maxtor 7345A into
his 386 system along with a 120M Caviar drive and experienced the same
difficulty.
// daniel on autopilot in paradise
\X/ powered by intel and motorola
Boy, that is strange. It would be interesting to see track down the
problem. As I am hobbling along right now, I'm sure I won't worry about
it until something else goes wrong. Well, I'll keep my eyes and ears open
for others who may have problems with Maxtor drives.
-Jerry
Quoting from my Quantum ProDrive manual:
"The RESELECTION phase allows a target to reconnect to an initiator to
continue some operation that was previously started by the initiator but
was suspended by the target (i.e. the drve disconnected by allowing a BUS
FREE phase to occur before the operation was complete)."
So reselection can let your computer disk IO work faster by letting it
start a second read or write operation going to a disk while its waiting
on the first disk to do a slow operation like a track seek.
So you should not have reselection turned on unless the disk drive
supports it. Also I think there may be a limitation in the Amiga's driver
that requires reselection on all disks to be set the same.
In HDToolBox you can see/set reselection by clicking on "Change Drive
Type". Select a disk then click on "Edit Old…". That will bring up the
window that lets you see or change if reselection is set.
//
\X/ Amiga or bust! Gary Bonnstetter, Bonnsoft
Very interesting. Thanks! The Quantum and Maxtor both have reselection
on and everything seems to be okay now.
I backed up my non-validating partition with the checksum error,
reformatted it, and restored the files. Everything is working like it
should. Now I just have to undo all the evil assigns and file copies I
did to get around it while I was rushing to meet schedules.
Thanks for that information. I really appreciate it.
-Jerry