Hi guys,
The original hard drive that I had NeSTStep installed on has crashed, so I'm working on replacing it.
However, I can't seem to get any of my other 50-pin SCSI drives to be recognized in my NeXTstation.
I've got two IBM DSAS-3540 drives which I can't get to work, and a Western Digital WDE4360 that I can't seem to get working either.
I get different errors depending on which type of drive I try to install on.
I have an original NeXTstation service guide, but it is completely silent on replacing the hard drive.
Any suggestions as to valid jumper settings or such that might get me started on the right path here?
Thanks in advance for any help...
Following the SCSI guidelines in general and the NeXT hardware specific SCSI properties I would try this:
In case You are using a SCSI cable with more than one connector place the HD at the -> physicaly <- last one on the SCSI cable (not logical one) which means it should be the last connector You can see. Because of the fact that NeXT black hardware tends to check the SCSI chain downwards and not upwards set the ID of the drive to 6 (not 7!!!) and terminate it. NeXTstep boots of the drive You specified as boot volume, otherwise it boots of the first device that holds a bootable system. But NeXTstep (to be more exact: the boot ROM) does not begin with ID number 1 but with ID number 6 (checking downwards from 6 over 5, 4 etc. to 1).
SCSI can show strange behaviours so just in case this one should not work try to remove the termination - at least this one worked within my cube. Some drives do have some sort of "drive spin up" jumper setting and in fact this one can be a solution, too. NeXTstep fires up rather fast, sometimes too fast for a drive so give it a try and set a jumper on this function if available.
And last but not (the) least: try another SCSI cable and maybe another power cable (those red and yellow ones). Note: You will not be able to use any SCSI drive with an adaptor from SCSI 2 (which the old black hardware uses) to SCSI-whatever (which some IBM drives use)! Almost all drives that are used on the internal SCSI chain need a SCSI 2 connector.
J
Ashman,
I have some 4GB Seagate 50pin drives if you need one to try. They are model ST15150N. They are full height drives, so I do not know if they will work in a NeXTstation, or will be too tall. I needed one for another machine, but had to buy a lot of 10, so I have a few left. Should work fine in a cube though, so If anyone needs one, let me know, and we can work something out.
Chef
Those Seagate ST's will fit into a station, in fact these drives are a bit more flattened than the original drives (my 140 MB original drive still works, thank God)
J
Quote from: "Jenne"Those Seagate ST's will fit into a station, in fact these drives are a bit more flattened than the original drives (my 140 MB original drive still works, thank God)
J
Good to know that they will fit.
Does one need to add a disktab entry for them to work, since they are greater than 2GB? I would like to replace the 540M in my color slab with a larger drive, so it would be nice to use one of them.
Chef
Well, you guys jogged my memory and I had a couple of seagate baracudas as well, so I popped one of those in there. Worked like a charm.
Just a tip though, as I now remember was mentioned somewhere on here before... If you're using an external CD-ROM drive to install the OS, and if your drive doesn't spin up once the external drive is disconnected, then it means that you need to change the jumpers on your drive to enable the SCSI terminator.
I got a SCSI BUS error when I tried to boot up, so I went back and put the jumpers on to enable the terminator and it booted up like a charm.
Oh well, live and learn. All I can say is that I'm beginning to hate SCSI and all of its jumpers with a passion... :x
Quote from: "nextchef"Does one need to add a disktab entry for them to work, since they are greater than 2GB?
Sorry, can't tell You anything about this as long as I only bought drives with 2 GB capacity :(
@ Ashman:
You begin to "love" SCSI :wink: I remember my old UMAX Pulsar working with six internal HDs and 5 external ones along with an optical drive... Man, sleepless nights, indeed! But it was the fastest machine in my neighbourhood in those times when it worked!
J
Quote from: "Jenne"I remember my old UMAX Pulsar working with six internal HDs and 5 external ones along with an optical drive... Man, sleepless nights, indeed! But it was the fastest machine in my neighbourhood in those times when it worked!
J
I still have a Daystar Genesis with 8 hard drives and two optical drives: six internal hard drives one one bus and two internal hard drives on the second bus with the CD-ROM and CD-RW. Combined with the quad 604 200mhz PPC processor card, it was at the Pinnacle of the Mac world in 1996. It's still a very repectable machine on OS7.6 and really shines running BeOS 5.03. I think I still have a drive bay or two empty in that atall tower.
Quote from: "Ashman"
I've got two IBM DSAS-3540 drives which I can't get to work, and a Western Digital WDE4360 that I can't seem to get working either.
You should bascially avoid any hard drive in that's not made by Seagate or Quantum, unless you want to try and ancient Connor or Micropolis. IBM and Fujitsu's are a pain in the arse trying to get going on NeXT's.
Seagate's work like a charm though you might need to write a disktab entry.
I have a number of ST15150N and was wondering what the proper termination setting for them are. On some machines, they seem to work fine without any jumpers, and on others, they need explicit cable termination.
These have 3 jumpers for termination.
I have not tried this drive specifically, but looking at the Seagate docs I would suggest enabling "Term. power from drive" and "Enable drive terminator". Theoretically that should be the most universal configuration and I always set all the drives this way, unless there is a specific need not to.
Earlier in the year I spent quite a while playing with SCSI on my slab, including making some adapters to use 68 pin drives, where I had to custom terminate the unused 8 bits. Worked beautifully, but there was no speed advantage, and in fact the drives were benchmarking slightly slower than native 50 pin drives.
On a completely separate note, I also tried the Acard ARS-2000SU SCSI to SATA adapter with an OCZ Vertex 2 SATA SSD. It worked beautifully, except on shutdown the slab would power off the drive before it finished flushing all the data, so on every restart would run a fsck. I since upgraded the Vertex firmware, but had no chance to check it again in the slab. I am certain that a Vertex 2 PRO (enterprise drive with on-board battery) would work 100% fine.
Quote from: "gtnicol"I have a number of ST15150N and was wondering what the proper termination setting for them are. On some machines, they seem to work fine without any jumpers, and on others, they need explicit cable termination.
These have 3 jumpers for termination.
Yep, that did the trick. The ST15150 documentation doesn't make it obvious which pins are which, but apart from that, it works like a charm.