MemAlloc@mcshh.hanse.de (Marco Pauck) (12/07/90)
No, this is not a question about how to install a drive in an NEW box (aka RS/6000) but in an OLD (aka RT) one. Maybe I will not install a RT itself anymore, but I'm sure I will add some drives in existing RTs for the next years. Here the story begins... I have problems installing an ESDI drive in a RT (6150-125) running AIX 2.2.1. In the past, I sucessfully installed several different drives (NEC, CDC, Fujitsu etc.) although with some problems. To be on the save way, this time I choosed a Newbury Data ND-4380E alias Maxtor XT-4380E. This is the drive which IBM sells as a "H310" type, so I jumpered the Maxtor drive the same way as a H310, put it in, and did a low-level format via VRM. Up to this point everything worked fine. But then confusion started. 8-( The high level format via diagnostics failed reporting FORMAT ERROR 9 FIXED-DISK DRIVE HARDWARE FAILRURE Skipping high level format and trying to install VRM sometimes results in another error message and sometimes the system just crashes displaying "c6/00" on the front panel. The diagnostics tell me that the Maxtor drive is OK. Another mystery: The Maxtor specs says the 4380 has 1224 cylinders. In the format menu of the VRM, the H310 is reported as having 1189 cylinders and 34 sectors/track. And the jumpering of the H310 itself tells me that it's 35 sectors/track (each 598 bytes)! Of course I tried any possible jumpering configuration... BTW, in the past some drives failed to be formated high level too. Other drives crashed the system in the middle of low level formatting. (No, not a single drive in a single RT, but several drives in several RTs.) All these drives are running for several years now without any problems! So, what's involved in adding third party products to IBM systems? Voodoo?? Please help, because I don't want to try yet another drive type only to encounter even more strange problems... -- Marco Pauck WMD GmbH, Hamburg, Germany uucp : MemAlloc@mcshh.hanse.de phone : +49 (040) 3900139