OK, here's a quick summary: Turns out the drive that I was attempting to
install was defective (I think it's the onboard terminators, but it could
also be the motor or the voice coil. Whatever the reason, it failed
completely Sunday, July 2 1995).
The debugging steps that I was told to use were:
1) Check to see the environment variable control_scsi_term was set to
external (this is at the >>> prompt at startup). According to DEC this
setting has no effect on the AlphaStation 200. The new drive that I am
running is moving along quite happily with this set to internal.
2) Check the SCSI termination. Only the 2 devices at either end of the
chain should be terminated (in my case since it was going from
motherboard -> one hard drive -> CD-ROM only the CD-ROM should be
terminated internally, and on the external bus I had the <defective>
second hard drive and the tape drive unit, and only the tape drive should
be terminated.
3) Check that the terminators on the terminated devices are active, not
passive, terminators.
4) Check for a DEC inline terminator at the end of the internal bus. If
this terminator is there you do NOT need to terminate the drive at the
end of the chain that the terminator is attached to.
5) Make sure the SCSI cabling does not exceed the maximum total combined
length (generally acknowledged to be about 3 meteres, or approximately 9
feet).
DEC Hardware Support told me that their systems require devices that have
parity enabled.
Adding the replacement drive:
Adding the drive was easy. Make sure it was NOT terminated (since it was
not at the end of the chain), plug it in, get power to it. Boot the
system (ensure external devices are powered and done spinning up before
the main system is turned on). As root go into /dev and MAKEDEV rrzx
(where x is the SCSI ID of the new device), then disklabel -rw /dev/rrzx
rz99 (or any other unused label). This goes and reads the settings from
the device and creates the standard DEC partitions. Once you've done
this you should be able to go and create file systems.
Thanks for everybody's tips/hints/pointers, too many to mention here.
Peter Clark
Systems Administrator
Plymouth Commercial Internet Exchange
Received on Mon Jul 03 1995 - 06:35:11 NZST