[svlug] Booting SCSI - no MBR

[Walter Reed]

At 10:52 PM 11/1/98 , Rafael Skodlar wrote:
>On Sun, 1 Nov 1998, Walter Reed wrote:
>> Well, I was noticing that after installing Slackware, I was getting drive
>> errors from fsck. The drive has an SCA port, and Fry's includes a cheap
>
>There is nothing special about the adapter to be expensive.
>
>> little SCA to power / SCSI / Jumper adapter. It looks like that stupid
>> little adapter doesn't have a jumper for termination, just terminator
>> power (it was labeled TPR). From the store display, I assumed that the
>> adapter was from Quantum. It's not. 
>
>Is the drive 8.6GB Atlas II? I bought a drive at Fry's about 10 days ago. 
>I installed it on my P120 with Adaptec SCSI on motherboard. I just
>repartitioned it and had only one problem: when I tried to create a
>partition bigger than 4GB I got error Writing inode tables:  513/
>536Segmentation fault. I guess the limit is 512 inodes. Using smaller
>partitions (2.2GB) all works fine. 
>
>I tested it with backing up my home dir of about 130MB to the new drive. 
>No errors. I believe that the drive is good no need to trash it.
>
>Looking at the 4 page manual that came with the drive: 2 jumpers shown on
>page 2 are for the termination. I can't take a PC apart right now but can
>check it for you tomorrow in case you can't get it to work.

That is exactly the drive. At only $350, it wasn't a bad deal. The manual 
that comes with the drive shows all the different versions of that drive.
The SCA version has not jumpers at all, so you are forced to have external
termination. If this is NOT the last drive in the chain, you are OK and 
theoretically it should work just great. Unfortunately for me, this is the
only SCSI drive in the system.

Why would an SCA-68 Pin adapter board NOT include termination capability?
Seems silly.

As for external termination, I haven't been able to find a female 68 pin model
that would dangle off my internal cable. I'm sure someone makes them.

FYI, I was dealing with small partitions -  two 2G parts, a 128M swap, and the 
rest as unpartitioned free space. Also, from Quantums web site, the Atlas II is
considered a "previous generation" which in my mind means that they will
probably
discontinue it soon. I guess I'd rather buy something a little more recent even
though there will be a price penalty.

While I was playing with this drive, I noticed that the Adaptec BIOS had an
option
to turn on or off translation for large drives. With this on, the drive 
reported something like 1197 cyls, and off was something around 8200 cyls.
Other than the boot partition needing to be under the 1024 cyl limit, is
there any
reason to use or not to use this translation (other than the obvious fact that
I have to re-partition the drive if I change the setting...)



--
Walter Reed
Engineering Director
InterTrade Systems Corp.


--
echo "unsubscribe svlug" | mail majordomo at svlug.org
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ to unsubscribe