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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
- Path: ebi.ac.uk!sterk
- From: sterk@ebi.ac.uk (Peter Sterk)
- Subject: Re: Apollo A1230 SCSI problems
- Sender: news@ebi.ac.uk (Mr news)
- Message-ID: <1996Apr16.215522@ebi.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 16 Apr 1996 21:55:22 GMT
- References: <Dpwr3o.JGy@ebi.ac.uk>
- Organization: European BioInformatics Institute
-
- In article <Dpwr3o.JGy@ebi.ac.uk>, sterk@EMBL-EBI.ac.uk (Peter Sterk) writes:
- >
- > I've had an Apollo A1230 Accelerator + built-in SCSI since last summer
- > and have had a few problems with it, mostly to do with autobooting.
- > Recently, my Quantum Lightning 730S (ID 0) hardly boots at all, and
- > worse, it gets corrupted. Also my second hd, an old Quantum 40S gives
- > lots of read and write errors. The trouble is, when it works, there
- > seems to be no trouble at all, but sometimes after resetting, I can't
- > boot from the disks anymore, sometimes the computer doesn't even see the
- > drives. I've checked the cabling, termination, swapped devices around
- > (there's also a CDROM drive attached to the chain), tried a different
- > PSU, to no avail. If I switch off the SCSI autoboot dip switch, the
- > Amiga boots normally from an internal IDE drive. SCSItester says the
- > harddisks are okay, I've tried them on a GVP controller as well, and
- > then they work fine, so my conclusion is that the SCSI controller on
- > the Apollo must be the culprit. One thing I haven't tried is active
- > termination at one end of the SCSI chain, but after spending lots of
- > money on AFS to add security to my partitions I don't want to spend
- > more money on something that maybe doesn't solve the problem.
- > Before I get back to the supplier (again), it would help if people could
- > share their experiences with me. I know that quite a few people have
- > reported problems with the SCSI controller and software in particular,
- > but I must admit that it has worked reasonably well for some time for me.
- >
-
- Forgive me for replying to my own posting. There's some additional info.
- First, I attached my SCSI chain to the back of an A590 SCSI controller/RAM
- expansion for the A500. Drives work without a hitch, so cabling an termination
- should be okay. I measured the voltage between pin 14 and 25 (ground and +5V)
- on both the A590's 25 pin connector and the Apollo's 25 pin connector. Exactly
- +5V for the A590, zero volts for the Apollo. So, perhaps the termination on
- the Apollo controller is inadequate. I'm seriously considering buying another
- SCSI controller - I bought the Apollo to save money, typical.
- Some final information, on request, the version of the SCSI-Apollo.device is
- 4.52, the version of the installation software is 4.0.0.
- Please keep posting your experiences (also good ones),
-
- Peter
-