AmigaActive (1492/1728)

From:Sean Courtney
Date:27 Jun 2001 at 14:19:30
Subject:SCSI hard drives.........BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACHHHHHHH!!

Arrright...Software Hut had a killer deal on 18-gig SCSI III hard
drives, so I took the bait.

Here's what happened...

Hard drive arrived in beautiful condition with a very, very detailed
and explicit manual on installation, configuration, etc. So I followed
it and configured the ID number to unit 1.

Mounted and connected the hard drive to my A4000 Power Tower via the
SCSI III interface on the Cyberstorm 060 MKIII. I went to HDInstTools
that came with PFS 3. It recognized the drive as a 17.799-gig drive set
to SCSI unit 1. Great! Went through the PDS\3 partition setup, etc. I
clicked "Save," got the busy-pointer, and waited...and waited...and
waited...and waited...after a while I got tired of waiting, so I
rebooted and tried again. And waited...and waited...and waited...and
waited. THinking maybe I'd try the latest HDToolBox or something, I
rebooted again, and here's what happened:

IDE hard drives whirred away, heard the SCSI drive start up, screen
flickered, and...nothing. The activity on the IDE drives stopped [the
drive light went out] -- that is, the ACTIVITY stopped; the drives
still work.

The exact same thing happened months ago with an old 500-meg SCSI drive
that used to sit in my wife's computer.

I can rule out:
1) the lack of power -- I unplugged everything from the PSU except the
SCSI drive and still got the flicker/nothing effect.
2) bad SCSI controller/port -- using an old hard drive that was
pre-formatted for Amiga works beautifully.

Now...here's what my SCSI chain consists of, with the drive connected:

Unit 1: internal SCSI III drive, not terminated. [The manual
specifically spells out that the drive comes NOT terminated because the
term power comes from the SCSI controller and the cable. There are NO
details as to HOW to terminate in emergency situations!]

Unit 6: external Zip 100 drive, not terminated. This is connected to
the external SCSI port of the Cyberstorm.

Unit 3: external Yamaha CRW4416sxz CD rewriter. Terminated and
connected to the Zip drive.

In case any of this has any effect, here's what else I have in the
computer [Power Tower 4000 MKII]:
- One double-density floppy drive, internal [yes, DOUBLE density...this
A4000 didn't come with an HD floppy.]
- Two sound cards: Prelude and SunRize AD516
- Picasso IV gfx card
- GVP I/O Extender with additional serial port
- ProMIDI interface
- Sega Genesis-compatible game pad in Port 1, mouse in Port 0
- 2 IDE drives -- one 2.1GB, one 13.6GB -- on scsi.device

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