[Info-vax] SCSI issues on Alpha

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Scott Dorsey wrote 2013-12-23 17:09:
> I've got a user who is a great fan of his  Alpha Personal Workstation 433a,
> and I'd like to consolidate the disks on it and replace them with a newer
> mirrored pair of disks.
>
> Currently on the SCSI chain he has the internal RZ1CC-BA, and externally
> he's got one Seagate ST1510N drive and two IBM DNES-318350W drive.  So the
> mix of wide and narrow is a little weird.
>
> Now, the only newer SCSI drives I have are Seagate ST3146807LC, since new
> scsi drives are not a common thing.  I can put them either on an adaptor
> to an 80-pin Honda connector or an adaptor to a 50-pin Centronics-style
> connector, but in either case the buss becomes extremely flakey... when
> I am at the monitor rom and do a "sh dev d" everything disappears or
> large numbers of duplicate drives appear.
>
> So... my first question is why is the "sh dev d" on this system so different
> than on the Decstation machines?  It seems like it is caching something; it
> does not do a buss reset every time I run the command.  What do I need to do
> in order to get it to actually force a buss interrogation?
>

Usualy a "$ MC SYSMAN IO AUTO".
That will re-scan the I/O-buses.
But that is from OpenVMS. If you are in the console
monitor, it's usualy an INIT (or power off/on).

Jan-Erik.



> And the second question is... why is this happening?  Is there something
> about the ST3146807LC that is a problem?  The low voltage mode?  The
> differential mode?
>
> I tried moving the whole external chain over to an Ultrasparc machine and
> everything works just fine there, I can't make the buss do anything odd.
> So I am thinking it's something specific to the way the Alpha implements
> it.
>
> Is there some other large drive I should be trying here?  Am I missing
> something important?
> --scott
>