recovering data from old hard drive

Grant Taylor cctalk at gtaylor.tnetconsulting.net
Sun Jan 26 13:13:18 CST 2020


On 1/25/20 12:57 PM, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote:
> I have dug out an old SCSI hard drive from 1997 that may have some 
> interesting stuff, most especially the source code for the SGI Iris 
> flight sim demo.  I have a Linux system with an Adaptec 2940 (aic7880) 
> that has two connectors on it.  It SEEMS from some probing that the 
> 50-pin IDC connector on the top of the board is single-ended SCSI 
> (it seems to have mostly grounds on one row of pins).  Same for the 
> drive, which is a Quantum ProDrive LPS.  The drive spins up and does 
> some seeking right after power-on, so it sounds like it is working. 
> But, I can't seem to find that the drive is being recognized by the 
> aic7xxx driver.  So, looking at /proc/scsi/aic7xxx/## I see the device 
> addresses all show just the negotiation settings, and /proc/scsi/scsi 
> just shows my SATA devices but not the real SCSI ones.

I believe Adaptec 2940s were all Single Ended.  I /think/ the 
differential cards that they made had a different number.

Go into the cards BIOS (firmware?) and poke around.  Does the card see 
the drive?

Also, check the termination.

Check the bus topology.  Different 2940s had different numbers of buses, 
one of which usually connects to the external connector.

> I have the right cable to plug my old HP scanner into the mounting 
> plate Honda connector, and it shows up fine.  I could try getting a 
> Honda to IDC-50 cable, but I thought the IDC50 connector on the board 
> edge OUGHT to work.

Termination is the most frequent problem.

> Does anybody have any suggestions on what to try?

(See above.)



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die





-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die


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