interfacing an Exabyte to a 4D/25

Dr. Larrabee Strow PHYS strow at umbc5.umbc.edu
Tue Sep 11 02:49:22 AEST 1990


I am trying to hook an Exabyte tape drive up to a SGI 4D/25 running
IRIX 3.2.  The tape drive uses address 7. When the system is booted 
the power up diags fail with:

>    sc0:  Unexpected transfer phase.  State=4b  Phase=33 
>    scsi (0,7,0) transfer aborted (Hardware error)   
>    Device 7 failed DMA test
>
>    Diagnostics failed 

etc ...

If I allow the bootup to continue, the system becomes essentially useless,
pandora doesn't load, and I keep getting scsi errors from the hard drive,
number 1.

The supplier had us try changing dip switch number 2 on the MX board but
the power up diags did not change.

We then hooked up the drive to a DECstation 3100 and had no power up
problems.  The DECstation recognized the exabyte as an exabyte, etc., 
although we could not try the drive out since the kernel wasn't set-up
to drive it.

Hopefully we just need to know the proper switch setting on the MX board -
although the supplier should be able to help here they have no suggestions.

L. Larrabee Strow        |  Department of Physics
strow at umbc3.umbc.edu     |  UMBC, Baltimore, MD 21228



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