[svlug] Adaptec 2940 Problem

[Greg Herlein]

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Hi Everyone,

I've got an unusual problem on one of my machines, and I'm
suspecting I may have a bad Adaptec 2940 card, or a bad SCSI
drive.  I'm hoping one of you has seen this and can help.

Here are the symptoms:  occasionally the box just locks up, but
it does so by the sytem load (as displayed on the fvwm loadmeter)
ramping waaaaaay up, the system getting sluggish, then finally
not responding to ANYTHING.  I have to reboot to clear the
problem.  In fact, a warm boot will get to the Adaptec bios
portion where it scans the SCSI bus looking for devices... and
hangs.  It never finds ANY SCSI devices.  A power-cycle reboot is
required to break it out of that state.

Machine:  Micron PII, IDE disabled, 
	  Adaptec AHA-294X Ultra SCSI host adapter          
	  SEAGATE   Model: ST34572W Hard Drive
	  PLEXTOR   Model: CD-ROM PX-32TS CDROM
	  3Com 3c905 Boomerang 100baseTx
	  Diamond Viper AGP video

Dist:	  Red Hat 5.1 with all applicable errata rpms installed

Kernel:	  2.0.35, including the aic7xxx stuff that's new to it.

There is no repeatable periodicity of the failure - it appears
random. The machine may go months, or a week, or a few hours. 
Using the older 2.0.34 kernel it happend more often, but that
might be chance.  I went to the 2.0.35 kernel and it's better
aic7xxx drivers suspecting it was some SCSI bus reset problem
that I'd read about on some newsgroup. In the last few months,
it's happened only once, and that may not have been a related
problem.  I thought I might have fixed it... until today.  I got
in today to find it locked up, and then while using it the
*&*&^$*$& thing did it again. 

So, has anyone seen this before?  The fact that it seems to fail
when seeking the devices on the bios start is a clue that points
at a bad SCSI card.  But, it might just be getting put into a bad
state that requires a power-off to clear (seen that kind of thing
too!).  

If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.  This is just odd
enough that I don't want to tell the client to replace the SCSI
card - it that doesn't fix it, he's out some cash and I look
silly.  Anyone?

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Greg Herlein                               gherlein at herlein.com
Herlein Engineering                             www.herlein.com 
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