Scsi sux to the max!

No good getting those FOUR Seagate Cheetah hds to work on ANY of my Amiga scsi systems (bin job)....so I purchased a HP MAX3036NP 36gb scsi hard drive.

This hd is SUPPOSEDLY known to work on GVP scsi controllers....

Plugged it into the same scsi cable as my existing 1gb Seagate Hawk (which works flawlessly, but is a little restrictive in size)...

...now I know the GVP Combo 040 scsi (gvpscsi.device) will only see 3.78gb of any given hd unless you have a guru rom installed (which I dont)... so booted up via the 1gb drive, went into hdtoolbox, installed the 36g drive, partitioned it into 4 partitions, total of 3.7gb (to be safe).

Rebooted. All partitions there. Formatted them, rebooted. All good.

Copied all my files from the 1gb hd to the partitions of the 36gb (3.7gb now!) hd. All good.

Rebooted. All paritions still there. All files there. everything works.

Remove the original 1gb hd - BOTH drives disappear.

Weird, as the other hd was not even the last on the scsi chain, so how could it have been terminating the chain?!?

OKiez, I thought, will put an active terminator at the end of the line - STILL no hd present (not even present in the early boot menu).

What tha'?!?! God I loath scsi....

Okiez. I downloaded the manual for the HP (Fujitsu) HD.... tried EVERY possible combination of jumpers (term power on/off, narrow scsi mode on/off, 8 bit mode on/off) NOTHING!!!

Plug the other hd back into the chain - BOTH hds appear.

When is someone going to produce an affordable and REALIABLE scsi to ide adapter (the one I have is garbage - works on VERY Few setups)???

Anyone have any ideas why this is happening? All I need is for the 36gb scsi drive to be present BY ITSELF.... I have an internal CD burner (scsi of course) that I can put at the end of the chain if that will help... hasnt yet though...

Any ideas?

In my experience, problems like this are always scsi termination reladed. I've always thought of it as a black art more than a science. Different controllers have different termination needs. Active, passive, last drive, etc.

I'm not familiar with the gvp card, but I would keep trying different termination combos. If you olny have 1 hd, use a cable with only 1 connector.

How many terminators on the chain?

Did you removed the termination from the GVP card (if any) and put one terminator on each end of the cable?

Did you set the drive as term_power ON + termination ON (if you have only one terminator) and nothing else?

Do you have a SCSI CD on the chain? Is it a narrow device on a wide cable?

Hi Rkauer, thanks for the help.

Okiez, the hard drive appears when I have in this order:

GVP Scsi ---> 50pin ribbon cable ---> 1GB HD ---> 36gb HD no terminators etc. It does not seem to matter what is set on the 36gb drive but the 1gb drive is set to terminate the chain.

Other things I have tried which do NOT work are:

Terminator <--- 50pin ribbon cable <--- GVP Scsi ---> 50pin ribbon cable ---> 36gb HD ---> Terminator. With this set up the HD light flicks on and off for a while then KS 3.1 screen appears. I have tried every combination of Terminator power, Narrow/Wide scsi, 8 bit/16 bit et etc - makes no difference.

GVP Scsi ---> ribbon cable ---> 36gb HD ---> Terminator. Same as above.

There is no Termination ON option on this 36gb HD, Only Termination power enabled.

The total options available on the 36gb HD are:

Scsi addressing (ID0, ID1, ID2, ID3)
Write Protect
Start CMD
Narrow/Wide
Diffsens
N C
IDD Reset
LED
Term Pwr En

Help? :(

Can you remember what LUNs (Logical Unit Numbers) were assigned to the drives and the controller before you removed the 1Gb drive? This sounds like the 'SCSI addressing' you refer to in your post.

It sort of sounds to me like the LUNs are getting re-arranged when the 1Gb drive is removed and the new one is clashing with the controller's ID number. This would either cause a system hang or for the controller to over-ride the hard drive, thus making it 'disappear'.

Termination can also be a strange beast to deal with. If the 36Gb is the last device on the chain then Termination Power should be enabled.

SCSI is in effect a loop and if the loop of devices isn't closed via termination, then all sorts of wierd :censored: can happen.

As you can tell from the posts, we need a bit more info to be able to zero in on what's going South on your SCSI chain.

Hi Merlin,

thanks for the help.

Well, with the qgb hd attached (so that BOTh appear), I can go into HDToolbox and:

1gb HD Address = 0, LUN = 0
36gb HD Address = 2, LUN = 0

Do I need to change the Lun? If so, how?

I've a feeling that the Drive mount table with parameters is being stored on the 1GB drive as you are booting from it originally, of course take the 1GB drive away & the system has no instructions to mount anything.

TC :cool:

If you boot from a floppy, does hdtoolbox see the drive? Perhaps the drive is being seen, but it is not configured as a boot drive.

The 36gb does not appear in the early boot menu, and booting from floppy makes no difference.

What TC says sounds interesting.... if this is the case I have two questions:

1 - how did this happen?
2- How do I fix it?

---------- Post added at 22:07 ---------- Previous post was at 21:08 ----------

TC had it in one.....

Created an emergency boot disk.... then powered down and replaced the 1gb hd with the 36gb hd and booted from the emergency disk.

Used HDToolbox to install and partition the 36gb hd (strange thing is it was already installed.... so an RDB WAS stored on the 36gb hd already) anywho, partitioned, rebooted, formatted.

And it now appears by itself.

I STILL dont know why it wasnt before OR why it is now..... any explanations?

Also, nothing I can do about the 3.78gb gvpscsi.device limit? Or should I just live with it?

The RDB block didn't have a boot information or doesn't have a file system stored, so it will not boot, nor recognized.

Simple problem, hard to see.