So I purchased several SCSI to IDE adapters from ebay, I have spent many many hours getting it working (there is a SCSI 1 and 2 jumper which needed to be set to SCSI 1).
NeXT recognizes my 2GB CF card (using a IDE to CF adapter), and I have even installed NeXTstep 3.3 on the 2GB CF card. But here lies the issue, when I reboot to boot into the CF card, I get the following error:
boot command: sd
boot sd(0,0,0)
booting SCSI target 0, ln 0
sc: didn't complete
READ: sdcmd bad state: 0
Bad cksum
Bad cksum
Bad cksum
Bad label
NeXT>
Now here is were it gets weird, I tried to reinstall via the boot CD by booting to the external CD, and guess what... It started to boot from the CD, then it began to boot the OS off the CF card (as in I was inside the OS, running apps, terminal, etc).... How is this possible (did it boot from the CD, then switch to boot off the CF somehow)???
I assume it might be something with the MBR on the CF card, but not sure.. Any help would be MUCH appreciated!
P.S. I also used DD in linux to clone another NeXT HD to the CF, still getting the same cksum bad label errors.
Sounds like a termination or block size issue.
NeXT computers are very picky when it comes to SCSI drives. Try enable the SCSI termination on the SCSI to IDE card. You may need to add a terminator if the card doesn't support termination.
Is the formatted block size set to 512 byte blocks? If you formatted it with NS, then it should be formatted correctly.
Well, figured it out. Turns out there is a PIO/DMA jumper setting. My CF card does not support DMA and the jumper needed to be set to PIO.
I will benchmark the disk speed and post my results, I wonder if a DMA supported CF card will make the disk speed faster...
Did you ever get any benchmarks for using CF via SCSI/IDE?
I did, it was SLOW, but then again I was using a cheap/old CF card, I will retry with a FAST IDE hard drive and see if it is the SCSI bus limiting me or the CF card (if it was the old card, I will retry with a FAST CF card and post results).