[SPARCbook] SPARCbook 3 SCSI Advice

[Chris Heric]

Yeah.. SCSI is an odd beast at best, and being a Mac/Unix guy myself I
have seen it all. From non-terminated SCSI connections working, to
"Active" vs. "Passive" termination, to flat out nonsensical solutions,
that work. It is hard to say without seeing or laying hands on, but I
am pretty sure your issue is termination.

Chris

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 5:18 PM, stephen price <sd_price at yahoo.com> wrote:
> haven't had a sparcbook3 in a while - but it sounds like a scsi buss issue
>
> 1) termination on disk pack?  none / active / passive ?
> 2) scsi id of the various devices you are trying to attach?
>
> regards
> steve
>
> --- On Tue, 7/20/10, Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> From: Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk>
>> Subject: [SPARCbook] SPARCbook 3 SCSI Advice
>> To: sparcbook at sunhelp.org
>> Date: Tuesday, July 20, 2010, 4:50 PM
>> Hi,
>>
>> My first post to the list. Hope someone is listening ;)
>>
>> I have a SPARCbook 3 and just bought an Apple HDI30 to HD50
>> external
>> SCSI cable, with a view to trying the external SCSI floppy
>> drive that
>> came with the SPARCbook but more importantly attaching an
>> external hard
>> drive and CDROM so that I may backup the machine and
>> install Solaris
>> 2.6.
>>
>> When I attach the cable at the SPARCbook end and leave the
>> other end
>> disconnected the SPARCbook booted fine. When I attached the
>> other end to
>> an external disk pack that was turned on prior to the
>> SPARCbook booting
>> the screen went from black to white but did not display the
>> SPARCbook
>> logo. It appeared to still be functioning - if I typed
>> PAUSE-A then
>> 'boot disk' the machine booted.
>>
>> I tried various combinations of drives but for the most
>> part the
>> SPARCbook hung. Alarmingly this also happened afterwards
>> when the cable
>> was completely disconnected. However, after being left a
>> while it did
>> boot and after a 'reset' it appeared to behave itself.
>>
>> Is this normal behaviour? I'm trying to narrow down what
>> the issue is
>> *without* damaging the SPARCbook, so any advice is greatly
>> appreciated.
>> Is it worth me attaching a serial console to port A to see
>> if there are
>> any diagnostics being issued?
>>
>> BTW - none of the peripherals I connected were
>> SUN-specific, in fact
>> they were an external generic SCSI hard disk enclosure and
>> a DEC BA350 3
>> drive canister external housing. I was able to do a
>> probe-scsi when the
>> BA350 was attached and a list of the drives attached, but
>> that was not
>> repeatable.
>>
>> Thanks for the help,
>>
>> Mark.
>> _______________________________________________
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>



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