Follow Up: SCSI-IDE RAID with Alphaserver 1200 - which SCSI card?

From: Chris Wigglesworth <c.wigglesworth_at_open.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 20:17:54 +0000

Many thanks to Peter Reynolds, Kevin Partin, Bryan Lavelle, Dr. Tom Blinn,
John Francini, Bryan Bahnmiller, and Joel Gallun for their replies.

I was told that ultra-wide differential SCSI and ultra-wide single-ended
SCSI are not compatible, and connecting incompatible devices may damage
either the card or the Raidkit.

Bryan Bahnmiller gave this link to a scsi faq
ftp://theref.c3d.rl.af.mil/public/scsi.faq

Joel Gallun pointed out that the QLOGIC ISP1040B/V2 Ultra-Wide (KZPBA) card
comes in both differential and single ended versions.

It turns out that I do have a single ended adapter marked as a KZPBA-CX.

The card and the RAIDkit will still not work together however.

I moved the card to a Personal Workstation 433au with the same 4.0d
operating system (for convenience as I can not bring down the server that
frequently). I then connected the RAIDkit to the PW433au via the KZPBA-CX
card as before, but with the self termination on the RAIDkit disabled and
with an active terminator connected to the back.

I then from the console tried booting the Digital UNIX 4.0d CD giving a
genvmunix flag as suggested by Joel Gallun.

This time the server got the Starting X Server message before the graphical
install and then hung with the following messages

halted CPU 0

halt code = 2
kernel stack not valid halt
PC = fffffc00002bbb18
warning -- HWRPB is invalid

Does this mean anything to anyone? Are there any setting that I need to
change on the controller perhaps?

My original message follows my signature,

Many thanks again,

Chris Wigglesworth.

----------------------------------------
Chris Wigglesworth
Physics Department, The Open University,
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA.
Tel: +44 (0) 1908 652127
Fax: +44 (0) 1908 654192
Mobile: (0797) 1528851
e-mail: c.wigglesworth_at_open.ac.uk
----------------------------------------

Dear All,

We have recently bought an Infortrend RAIDkit 400 enclosure (SCSI-IDE RAID
controller) with 6 IBM 16.8Gb IDE hard drives installed in it. It is
described as having an Ultra-Wide SCSI Host connection. I would ideally like
to connect this to our Alphaserver 1200 5/533, but have run into some
problems.

Firstly to test it I connected it to an Intel based NT server as the only
device connected to an Adaptec 2940UW Ultra-Wide SCSI PCI card. I configured
the array with a SCSI ID of 0 and set it to self terminate. It worked fine
and could be seen as a single 80Gb drive.

Next I connected it to the Alphaserver 1200 as the only device connected to
a QLOGIC ISP1040B/V2 Ultra-Wide card. A show dev at the console showed the
Raidkit with the correct ID. I booted from the Digital UNIX 4.0d
installation CD, but after a message saying that it was starting the X
install program the machine crashed and rebooted, the last visible messages
(which appear normal) before the reboot being:

Loading SIOP: script c0000c00, reg 7fddf00, data c000abd0
scsi2 at psiop1 slot 0
Created FRU table binary error log packet

It repeated this boot-crash cycle until I halted the server from the front
panel.

Next I connected it to the Alphaserver 1200 as the only device connected to
an NCR 53C810 8-bit SCSI-2 card. A show dev at the console showed the
Raidkit with the correct ID. I booted from the Digital UNIX 4.0d
installation CD, which placed me into the X based install program. From this
I was able to see and partition the array without problems, but I would
really like this to work from an Ultra-Wide SCSI card.

Is the problem that I have the wrong kind of Ultra-Wide SCSI card? I noticed
that the QLOGIC ISP1040B/V2 is described as an Ultra-Wide Differential card,
so do I need the ISP1020 which is single-ended? I believe the Raidkit is a
single-ended device but I am not sure. I don't know that much about SCSI,
are Ultra-Wide Differential and Ultra-Wide Single-Ended incompatible.

Many thanks,

Chris Wigglesworth.
Received on Thu Dec 17 1998 - 20:17:20 NZDT

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