Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
On Wed, 8 Sep
2004, Jules Richardson wrote:
Hmm, do check that the drives don't have their own termination jumper
that's set - having the bus terminated twice at one end could cause all
sorts of problems (and in theory damage devices on the bus, although
I've never seen that happen in practice)
The problem is I'm trying to get
a system working with several different
old MO drives (Maxoptix Tahiti 1, Pinnacle Micro REO-650/1300, Sony
<forgot the model>). The Maxoptix is not even being recongized, and may
well be dead dead dead. The Pinnacle is being recognized but I'm getting
the errors mentioned. The Sony drive gets recognized OK and the system
boots but then I get a bizarre message in the Adaptec BIOS that says it's
not a disk drive(!) Well then what is it? It's a Macinstor drive (ugh,
can't think...forgot who the manufacturer is).
Jerome Fine replies:
I am not sure if my experience will help or not, but just in case:
BUT, first I should mention that I use an Adaptec PCI card:
an AHA-2940AU with the MO drives on the external connector,
so my experience MIGHT not apply to the ISA 1532 card,
although, IIRC, I think was using a 1532 card in my old system
about 3 years ago with about the same sort of problems!
I have used both Pinnacle Micro REO-650 and Sony SMO S-501
drives at the same time on the same daisy chain. In general, I rarely
have difficulty when there are multiple Sony drives on the SCSI bus.
However, the Pinnacle REO drives are probably NOT cabled correctly
since they usually are a problem, especially when the Pinnacle MO
drive is the first in the chain. If you look inside the box, my experience
has been that the centronics 50-pin connectors are NOT at the ends
of the cable connected to the drive; with my Pinnacle REO-650 drive,
the drive is at the END of the cable and one of the 50-pin centronics
connectors is connected to the middle. While this configuration does
not always cause a problem, even when there are just 2 MO drives
(including 1 Pinnacle REO-650 drive), at this point, I ALWAYS avoid
using any Pinnacle REO-650 drives UNLESS it is just ONE drive on
the SCSI daisy chain.
In addition, even when I used ALL Sony SMO S-501 drives, I found
that the AHA-2940AU was NOT able to support more that 3 such
Sony SMO S-501 drives, IIRC! I might have used 4 drives 1 or 2
times, but certainly NOT on a regular basis since the SCSI daisy
chain seemed unable to support more than 3 SMO drives in my
system. NOTE, however, that part of the problem could have been
a rather long SCSI cable (about 6 feet) prior to where the first
Sony SMO S-501 drive was connected to the SCSI daisy chain.
For a while, I was using the 3 * Sony SMO S-501 drives under
Windows 98 SE with E11 and RT-11. I also had a Sony SMO S-501
drive on a real DEC PDP-11 system with a CQD 220/TM SCSI
host adapter. The primary purpose was for backup on both the
PC and the PDP-11, but on some occasions, I used the MO media
in production on the PC at the end of the session with a RAM: disk
under E11 as the active RT-11 device since the MO media were
so slow.
Sellam, does this information help?
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
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