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2 pc's 1 external SCSI storage box

C

C0ffee

Junior Member
HI,

I have an external SCSI tower that holds 7 50 pin devices, so far it is filled with 5 cdroms and 2 harddrives.
The SCSI box has 2 external 50pin centronix connections.
I have 2 pc's each running windows 2k sp2 and adaptec 2940 scsi cards.
I have connected each pc to the SCSi box via appropriate external cables.

Seperately, either pc boots fine, detects all external scsi devices and I can use them from windows2k.

BUT if I try to boot 1 computer while the other is already on and connected to the SCSI box 2 things happen:
1. The scsi devices become unavailable to the previously running pc
2. the one that was booting up stalls on start up

Is there a way to get both machines to access the SCSI devices at the same time?
What am I missing???
Do I need newer SCSI cards?

Any help is most appreciated!
Thanks
Coffee
 
Sharing SCSI generally cannot be done without specialized hardware/software. (contention) Shared SCSI in a SAN setup usually uses uses Fibre for the connections and specialized hardware (the enclosure itself) and software to handle the contention issues.

Your best bet is to connect the box to one of the PC's then just share the devices on your network.
 
Hi,

Wanted to post a followup...

I couldn't just give up on it, an i've met with limited success...

After tinkering around a bit I came up with a solution that allows both pc's to see the hard drives at the same time. However, problems arise when reading/writing to the same disk at the same time THEN I have contention problems. I've noticed that on each machine, the Windows2K distributed link tracking trys to claim ownership of the drives...

Anyway, here are my current settings...

1. Disabled the bios on both scsi cards
2. Removed the SCSI CD-Roms on the shared bus
3. Make SCSI adapters have id's at the end of the chain: ex card 1 - id 6, card 2 - id 7
4. terminate correctly or use hardware that supports auto termination 🙂

Both machines boot and can see the drives.

So now I am off to learn more about disk contention 🙂
Later
C0ffee
 
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