[rescue] Sun E4500 SCSI weirdness

[Mr Ian Primus]

I've been having intermittent issues with the onboard SCSI on my Sun Enterprise 4500. It's the ESP SCSI on the I/O board. The internal DVD drive always works fine, but it's picky about what drives it'll work with connected to the external port. I've tried various combinations of drives and cables, and some drives just won't show up - or generate errors like "Unexpected in 1". One drive, a Seagate 18 gig, I have been using as my boot drive. It has Linux loaded on it. When I do a probe-scsi from the monitor, it prints Drive 0, then clears the screen, then continues with the ID string from the drive. It seems to hate HP branded drives, and simply ignores them.

Sometimes, this port generates I/O errors within Linux - which results in the root partition going offline, which causes all sorts of bad things to happen.

I've swapped over to using the SCSI port on the PCI I/O board. This one seems to work properly, no I/O errors thusfar. Also, drives correctly identify using probe-scsi-all.

I'm only trying to use one device (and the internal DVD, of course). I'm using a Sun 611 drive enclosure. I've tried different cables, different enclosures, different drives, using a terminator, not using a terminator (The 611 is self-terminating), etc.

The thing is, that I've even swapped the main I/O board with a spare, and still have the same problems. It shouldn't be HV differential, because it has the SE SCSI logo on it.

Any ideas?

-Ian