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Date:      Mon, 25 Aug 1997 21:32:40 -0500 (CDT)
From:      bartling@cyrix.com (Steve Bartling)
To:        freebsd-scsi@freebsd.org
Cc:        dietz@cyrix.com (Carl Dietz), gregg@cyrix.com (Greg Grohoski), bartling@cyrix.com (Steve Bartling)
Subject:   Freebsd2.2.2, adaptec 1742A and Ultra SCSI drive
Message-ID:  <199708260232.VAA15184@mega.eng.cyrix.com>

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Please respond by email since I do not subscribe to the
freebsd-scsi mailing list. I will bounce any email I
receive back to the freebsd-scsi mailing list in order
to keep the discussion thread active.

My Problem :

I replaced a defective Micropolis 2217 1.7 Gig Fast SCSI-2
drive with a new ultra scsi Micropolis 4743NS.

Since Ultra-scsi is "backwards compatible :-)", I never
thought much about the upgrade. I.e. I did my "homework"
and attempted to make sure that Ultra-scsi was supposed
to be backwards compatible. So much for being naive.

Current Hardware :

1742A EISA SCSI controller,
(2) Maxtor 213SY 200M SCSI-1 drives,
Exabyte 8200 tape drive,
Archive 2150s,
Toshiba XM3401TA cdrom drive,
Micropolis 4743NS

This is a 4 year old rock solid AMD5x86 133 Mhz system.
until the micropolis 2217 died, this system could stay up
for weeks until I powered down :-).

Well ... lets get to the problem. Neither DOS, W95, or
freebsd could talk to this drive. Cabling/termination is
not the problem. I have tried all juxtipositions of internal/
external/end-of-the-cable/beginning-of-cable/terminated/non-terminated/
terminator-power-supplied-by-the-drive/terminator-power-not-supplied

Nothing helped.

I then disabled "syncronous negotiation" and "disconnection" for
this drive only using the usual EISA configuration utilities.

Now the Micropolis 4743 will talk reliably to DOS/W95
albeit at SCSI-1 like data rates.

Freebsd will read data/partition info/etc from the drive.
However, any writes to this drive will "hang" the scsi bus until 
I hit the reset button on the computer case.

I can't even install Freebsd as the scsi bus locks up
as soon as freebsd attempts to write the new partion/
slice info to the drive.

Has anyone experienced a similar problem ? Any idea what
steps I can take other than upgrade my motherboard/scsi-card/
vlb-graphics-card ? I currently lack the funds for that
approach.

- Steven Bartling

P.S. The adaptec technical support folks were pretty amused
     that I would hook up an ultra-scsi drive to a 1742A.
     They stated : "Unless there is a jumper on the drive to
     force it to use SCSI-2 negotiation and data rates, there
     is no chance this ultra-scsi drive will work with the
     1742A". How is that for encouragement ?



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