the wonders of SCSI

[Keith Ericson]

In article <1990May27.092900.828 at wolves.uucp> ggw at wolves.UUCP (Gregory G. Woodbury) writes:
>SCSI Easy?!?!?!
>
>HA!
>I'v just spent the evening and night tring to get a maxtor 330MB scsi up
>and working with ISC 2.0.2.  The drive is there, but there is no manual
>entries to RTFM for getting the thing integrated into the damn system.
>

Greg -

	I can sympathize with you.  I've done many, _MANY_ installations of
ISC 2.0.2 (don't get excited, ISC - it's always the same machine!) with ESDI,
RLL, SCSI drives.  The easiest time I ever had was with a SCSI: Adaptec 1542A
plus CDC/IMPRIMIS/S-word Wren V or VI (I forget - the 600 Mbyte goodie).  The
worst time I ever had (am still having) is eggzactly the same machine (Everex
STEP/25) and above compoments EXCEPT replace the CDC/IMPRIMIS/S-word drive with
a MAXTOR XT-3280 that a co-worker found laying around in our (internal) PC
Service center that they didn't know what to do with.  

	This Maxtor has been a royal pain in the ass!  The only thing that
will reliably format it is the scsicntl program from adaptec: even the
internal (BIOS) formatter can't create a reliably-writable disk!  (Symptom:
DOS's fdisk acts as though it's creating a partition table but after
rebooting - expecting to do the high-level DOS format, you find the
partition table hasn't been created!).  I had better luck formatting it with
a WD 7000ASC controller (fairly old - it's not a FAST version) and that
worked fine - but I can't run UNIX on that controller.

	I _think_ I've got it on the run now.  I'm installing ISC 2.0.2 from
my tapes.  I'll know in less than an hour if it's working or not...  I
_never_ had this kind of problem with the CDC... drive.  I'm beginning to
wonder id the controller was [is?] trying to talk faster than the drive can.
I mean, the drive isn't particularly new - maybe it's old technology...

kEITHe

PS - I actually have two of these Maxtor drives; the other one doesn't work
     any better.