Scsi woes

[Beowulf]

I just was recently given a server by a family friend. They had it sitting in a garage and it was given to them (he is by no means computer knowledgeable). He told me to take it if I could make use of it so I am thinking about running my own proxy server to get around my college's firewall and a file server. Well.. It has 4 hot swappable Scsi drives in it and a Adaptec Century DPT PCI controller card. If i have all the drives turned on it will go to search for the scsi drives in post, sit about 5 minutes then start a long beep that never ends. If I turn all the drives off but the first one it will detect it and go about it's bussiness. I installed Windows 2k server on it (I don't think the computer will handle much else though it runs 2k server like a champ) and loaded up the SCSI drivers in Windows install. If i turn any of the drives on except the first one it will do the same beep after a couple of minutes. How do I get the use of the other drives? When I installed Windows all were off except the first one also, could that be causing it?


The system is as follows:
dual Pent II at 400mhz each
256 PC100 SDIMM
4 hotswappable 9 gig SCSI drives
1 IDE 12 gig Bigfoot drive (added in till I can get the Scsi working)
Asus P2B-D motherboard

 

[MrCoffee]

Is your SCSI chain properly terminated? (i'm sure it is) and have you checked the drives all have different ID numbers?

did the computer come with an OS installed and did the drives work then?

whats displayed on the screen when you get the Beep and can you access the SCSI bios (assuming the card has one) with the drives active? Are you using SCAM? Are the drives in any sort of RAID configuration?

 

[Beowulf]

there is a flat panel on the end of the scsi cable so I am guessing that is the terminator. I have not checked the drive ID numbers is that going to be a jumper setting on in the scsi Bios?

When it starts loading the scsi bios. It will saying "Waiting for devices, press (Crtl-D) to enter setup" and start beeping and sit there with no movement or further display.

There was no OS installed when I got the server and it was missing the power supply and ram.

How do I go about checking the drive ID, SCAM???, and RAID config as I can not get into the scsi setup with more than the first drive on and it will only display the first drive. There is one other drive i can slide into a hotswappable bay it will boot and not give any problems or beeps but it will not detect this drive, just the first one.

 

[MrCoffee]

the stage you refer to is where the SCSI bios scans the SCSI ID's for devices and reports those devices to the screen (like your BIOS does with the rest of your hardware). It could be that there is a ID conflict but if you havent set these drives up yourself that seems unlikely.

SCSI ID's are generally set with jumpers on the back of the drives (rather like the slave/master jumpers on an ATA disk). the numbers are in binary so if you are running 8 bit SCSI there will be 4 jumpers and 16 bit SCSI 5 jumpers. Confirm that all the drives have different ID's!! also I imagine the SCSI Adapter is setup with ID 7 so dont use this on the drives. priority runs from ID 7 to 8 with all the other IDs inbetween i.e. 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8.

you can check in the system BIOS to see if there is a SCAM setting. Enter the SCSI BIOS (ctrl-D) and tell me if there are any RAID settings

also what power supply (wattage) are your using, i'm sure you realise your SCSI setup is using about 125W of power by itself with 4 drives.

 

[Beowulf]

Thanks for the help, work has kept me busy since I posted but I will hopefully get the chance to look at the server some more tonight. It has a 300watt power supply in it right now. I will have to pull the drives out and check the jumpers. Will the jumpers be on the drives themselves or the back of the hotswappable docks? I will check out the bios and all tonight after work and post a responce.

 

[Alex81388]

They should be on the drives themselved.

Remember they are in binary, so I think theres four pins labeled 1 / 2 / 4 / 8

obveously you combine numbers to make higher, like you use jumpers 2 and 4 to set it to set it to ID 6. Get it?

Anyways post back

 

[Capricorn]

Almost all SCSI woes I ever had could be traced back to a cable that's gone bad or SCSI termination. Since we could assume that this was a working machine at one time, the termination should be right unless it's come loose from the end of the cable. The drives themselves can often be set to supply termination, but I would guess that's not being done based on what was described.

It is possible that during the move, one or more SCSI address jumpers fell off the drives and that two drives are now at the same address or at the address of the controller. This could definitely cause the behavior you're seeing.

 

[MrCoffee]

300W huh, well thats a possible reason then. Try a more powerful PSU if you can to eliminate this option.