damour@osiris.CSO.UIUC.EDU (12/04/86)
****** line eater food *****
Hello out there! I have a question that perhaps some one of you has
the answer to. My office has an IBM PC with 2 floppies and an
expansion module that came with a 10 Meg hard disk, controlled by a
Xebec hard disk controller. We received a Seagate ST 238 30 Meg hard
disk and a SMS/OMTI 5527A controller card. Here's the problem: the
OMTI card encrypts the data (RLL ?) so that the ST 238 will store 30
Meg instead of 20 Meg. (At least that's what I have been told.) The
10 Meg hard disk does not want to work off of the OMTI card. I was
told that the 10 Meg can't support the encryption and that's why it
won't work. Well, my next step was to leave both cards in the
expansion chasis with the OMTI card jumpered so that the BIOS would be
at a different HEX address. It didn't work. This silicon beast
refused to acknowlege that the 30 Meg Seagate (drive d:) existed. I
also was getting a "1701" error when I booted the machine. If I take
either controller card out then the "1701" error goes away. I have now
been told that I might need to reset the IRQ level of one of the cards,
does anybody have any thoughts on the matter? Thanks in advance,
Chris D'Amour - A Biologist With A Mission!
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convex-/
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.berger@clio.Uiuc.ARPA (12/06/86)
This depends on which Xebec controller you have. If it's the S1410A as many early PC's used, there's also a SCSI host adapter card. In any case, you have to worry about three kinds of conflicts: Hardware port addresses, interrupts, and ROM. I'm not convinced you can use the OMTI RLL controller with another controller. It's also not surprising that your old 10 meg drive won't work with RLL encoding. It entails a higher bandwidth drive, and usually requires plated media or sputtered coating disk, and a faster seek time.
simon@ms.uky.edu (G. Simon Gales) (10/09/89)
I've noticed something about my 286 at home that could be a problem. After
the box is turned off for more than 5 minutes or so, it has problems booting
back up. The drive makes all sorts of noises - heads popping and such - and
the bios says the drive could'nt be initialized.
If I let the thing sit for about 10-15 minutes, or just keep ctl-alt-del'ing
for 15 minutes, the thing will boot eventually and run without any problems
at all. Just a cold <power-up> boot has problems. Turning it off, then
back on immediately causes no problems.
My suspicion is that the power supply is too puny to pull all of the drives -
a 40 meg full-ht, 20 meg half-ht, 1.2 meg floppy, and a 10meg Irwin tape. The
motherboard is a WD that requires only 15 watts. Finally, it has an internal
modem and 1meg on a RamPage card. All powered from a 115 watt power supply.
Has anyone noticed these symptoms before? Was the power supply the problem?
thanks,
simon.
--
Simon Gales@The University of Kentucky
simon@ms.uky.edu | 'Fate... protects fools, little children,
simon@UKMA.BITNET | and ships named Enterprise.'
{rutgers, uunet}!ukma!simon | - Riker, ST:TNGrobert@hemingway.WEITEK.COM (Robert Plamondon) (10/12/89)
In article <12876@s.ms.uky.edu> simon@ms.uky.edu (G. Simon Gales) writes: >My suspicion is that the power supply is too puny to pull all of the drives - >a 40 meg full-ht, 20 meg half-ht, 1.2 meg floppy, and a 10meg Irwin tape. The >motherboard is a WD that requires only 15 watts. Finally, it has an internal >modem and 1meg on a RamPage card. All powered from a 115 watt power supply. Well, since you have vastly more stuff in there than IBM put in its PC/XT, and the PC/XT still had a bigger power supply than yours, I'd say you're probably right. I would run right out and buy a 200 watt power supply. I would also back up the hard drive and do a low-level format (not a DOS format) -- stepper-motor hard disks often need reformatting after a year or two. I would also run out and buy a copy of UPGRADING AND REPAIRING PCS. I don't remember the author's name, but the publisher is QUE. It is a gold mine of PC hardware information. -- Robert -- Robert Plamondon robert@weitek.COM "No Toon can resist the old 'Shave and a Hair-Cut'"
akcs.larry@nstar.UUCP (Larry Snyder) (10/19/89)
>I've noticed something about my 286 at home that could be a problem. After >the box is turned off for more than 5 minutes or so, it has problems booting >back up. The drive makes all sorts of noises - heads popping and such - and >the bios says the drive could'nt be initialized. I had the same problems on one of my machines due to what is called "stiction" in the 4051 hard drive. Sometimes after sitting the drive would not spin up - while after a couple of minutes it would work just fine.