gyp@ccadfa.adfa.oz.au (Patrick Tang Guan Yaw) (01/17/90)
I would like to know if anyone out there has installed a 3rd party SCSI disk on a DN2500 machines. If you have I would be very much appreciated if you could give me the company name and address and whether you need to use your own driver and/or controller. Thanks in advance. ---- Patrick Tang Guan Yaw, Phone : +61 62 68 8822 Dept. of Mathematics, EMAIL-ARPA/CSNET : gyp@ccadfa.cc.adfa.oz.au ADFA, Canberra, 2600. UUCP : ..!uunet!munnari!ccadfa.oz!gyp AUSTRALIA ACSnet : gyp@ccadfa.oz
krowitz%richter@UMIX.CC.UMICH.EDU (David Krowitz) (01/17/90)
We have attached a Sony magneto-optical disk drive (an erasable optical
disk with removable 600MB cartridges) which we purchased from Workstation
Solutions. The drive uses the native SCSI disk controller software which
is built into the DN2500 kernal. The cable caused us some problems. The
drive has a standard 50-pin edge connector with the wire clips (like you
see on an external disk for the Mac), but Apollo for some reason decided
to use a 50-pin edge connector with thumb screws to hold the cable in
place. A regular SCSI cable will work, but the connection will not be
real secure on the DN2500 end. Our original cable was an 8-foot (2.5 meter)
one made with regular twisted pair wire, and we had reliability problems
with it. Workstation Solutions shipped us a shorter 3-foot (1 meter)
ribbon cable which has worked just fine. It seems like the DN2500's SCSI
interface may be a little weak on handling longer cables. One we had the
drive attached, we ran the DN2500 self-test (type "TE" to the memonic
debugger) which checks the SCSI bus and reports which devices are attached.
We then gave the reset command ("RE" to the memonic debugger), and then
the command "DI SD2:0" to tell the system that we had a SCSI device with
a unit number of 2 attached to the system. Finally, we did another reset,
a "DI N" to tell the system to boot off of the network, and a "BOOT"
command to bring the machine up. Once the DN2500 was up, we could run
the online versions of invol and salvol to init the disk by refering
to the disk as "w2:0" for the device. The drive acts like a normal Apollo
disk. The only tricky part is giving the "DI SD" command before booting
(even if you're not booting off of the disk and have to give another "DI"
command afterwards to set the correct boot device).
-- David Krowitz
krowitz@richter.mit.edu (18.83.0.109)
krowitz%richter.mit.edu@eddie.mit.edu
krowitz%richter.mit.edu@mitvma.bitnet
(in order of decreasing preference)lampi@pnet02.gryphon.com (Michael Lampi) (01/18/90)
gyp@ccadfa.adfa.oz.au (Patrick Tang Guan Yaw) writes: >I would like to know if anyone out there has installed a 3rd >party SCSI disk on a DN2500 machines. If you have I would be >very much appreciated if you could give me the company name >and address and whether you need to use your own driver and/or >controller. > >Thanks in advance. >---- >Patrick Tang Guan Yaw, Phone : +61 62 68 8822 >Dept. of Mathematics, EMAIL-ARPA/CSNET : gyp@ccadfa.cc.adfa.oz.au >ADFA, Canberra, 2600. UUCP : ..!uunet!munnari!ccadfa.oz!gyp >AUSTRALIA ACSnet : gyp@ccadfa.oz MDL Corporation provides several 3rd party SCSI disk drives for the DN2500. These are supplied as plug-and-play devices, with no need for the user to provide a driver or a controller. The address is: MDL Corporation P.O. Box 745 Torrance, CA 90508 USA Michael Lampi MDL Corporation 213/782-7888 fax 213/782-7927 UUCP: {ames!elroy, <routing site>}!gryphon!pnet02!lampi INET: lampi@pnet02.gryphon.com "My opinions are that of my corporation!"