Help setting up SCSI drives

[mallik]

I have a SCSI HD and a SCSI CD ROM, and I'm having trouble setting them up. The CD ROM is a Toshiba (XM-6201B) and the HD is an Ultrastar 9es. It seems that I can have one or the other connected and with power, but not both at the same time. This is wierd because it used to work fine before no problems. I don't have too much faith in my power supply, so I initally thought that having them both hooked up is causing the problem, even though they were working fine before. Could a crappy power supply be the problem? I'm thinking I may have messed up the jumper settings when I tried to change the CD ROM ID to 2 from 5. My HD is on ID 0, and it is on the 68-pin channel while the CD ROM is on the 50-pin. The jumpers on the CD ROM are the three ID ones (ID1, ID2, and ID4), PRTY, TERM ON/OFF, PRV/ALW, TEST, and POWER SUPPLY. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Chaotic42]

What host adapter are you using? It almost sounds like the card doesn't want to use both channels, just one or the other. A quick answer would be to purchase a 68->50 pin adapter, but that might not be necessary.

Also, you do have proper termination on both channels, correct? I'd also put the adapter at ID7. Why do you have the CD-ROM with 3 IDs?

 

[mallik]

I'm using a 2940UW.

I checked the setting, and I think both devices have termination. Here are the jumper settings for the CD ROM (* means that there's a jumper on it).

ID1*
ID2
ID4*
PRTY
TERM ON/OFF*
PRV/ALW
TEST
POWER SUPPLY

I hope that's clear. I'm thinking more and more that it might be the power supply though. When I was messing around with it this time, I disconnected the 68 pin cable to the HD, but left the power connected, and it still didn't work. But when I had the CD ROM hooked up by itself, it worked fine.

 

[Chaotic42]

Hmm, yeah, I'm inclined to agree with you. Do you have another PSU you can test?

 

[redbeard1]

I've had that same card give me grief, having it hooked up the same way your describing. How the 50 pin affects the 68 pin I never figured out. My problem ended up being a conflict, of some sort, with termination. I ended up using an active terminator on the 68 pin cable, and letting the cdrom use it's terminator.

What jumpers do you have enabled on the hard drive?

From what you show, the cdrom should be on 5 and terminated.

You don't say what your system is, but I would hope that it could handle a couple of drives. Is it possible that the power cable going to the HDD is bad. I've ran 5 drives and 2 cdroms off a 300 watt power supply before.

Is there any situation that you can get the hard drive to now?

 

[mallik]

I don't have another PSU to try it out on, but I guess I'll have to try and find one.

On the HD, I have the SCSI TERM ON jumper enabled, and another one called ENABLE AUTO SPIN. That's it. So it's on SCSI ID 0. My system is a P3-733 with CUV4X MB, so I don't know if that would be the problem. One thing to note is, that I took the power connector from the cd rom, and hooked it to another HD, and computer would not start up at all. It would shut itself off after about 3 seconds. So it looks like the PSU might be the culprit. I'm actually using the computer off the HD right now. I just disconnected the CD ROM and had only the HD connected, and it booted fine.

 

[redbeard1]

It may be that drive power plug end is bad. If you have a power Y splitter, put that on the end that works and then run it to the two devices.

 

[mallik]

well, I finally got another power supply to try it out (350W, P4 and AMD compliant), and it still didn't work. I think this power supply was fine, because I hooked up 3 HD's on the 68-pin channel, and I had no problem. Does anyone know how to fix this, because I had it working fine before. I don't understand what happened. Now the CD light just flickers, I can't open the tray, and the 2940UW won't recognize it.

 

[mallik]

anyone?

 

[mechBgon]

Maybe your CD-ROM drive is dying/dead.

 

[Zepper]

Both drives should be terminated, don't skip ID numbers, set the HD to 0 (no jumpers on ID pins), set the CD to 1 (1 jumper on the first ID pin). Set them up properly in your BIOS setup (CTRL-A at boot time - if you don't see the Adaptec prompt to "Press Ctrl-A for Setup", make sure the BIOS is Enabled). Don't mess with the adapter, leave it set to Id.7 (default).
. Here's how to look at the 50 and 68 pin internal connectors of the 2940UW. imagine that the adapter has only one connector on it and has a 16wire ribbon cable going thru it (like the middle connector on an IDE cable), but only 8 of the wires go out one side (to the 50 pin) and 16 wires go out the other (to the 68 pin). The terminator in the HD terminates ALL 16 wires. The terminator in the CD only terminates the lower 8 wires. When the adapter is set to auto terminate mode, it detects that and terminates the upper 8 wires only so all wires are terminated at both ends. If the adapter detects only a 68-pin, it terminates ALL 16 wires, if just a 50 pin, then just the lower 8 are terminated. SCSI is very fussy about termination. I would advise getting some good active terminators for each cable and use them instead of the termination built into the drives (which is often passive). Or get a 50-68 adapter so you can put both drives on one cable and then you only need the one active terminator.
. More helpful info at: www.scsifaq.org .
.bh.