cunning@iscnvx.uucp (Dave Cunningham) (05/03/91)
I recently inherited an Exabyte drive from a defunct sun site, and I
am trying to attach it to an Iris. (4D-20, 3.3.2). I am using a cable
originally intended to connect a Sun 3 to a disk with a
centronics-style scsi connector. In this case the centronics-style
end is on the Iris, and the Sun-style 50 pin D at the Exabyte. The
Exabyte is in an Andataco enclosure, with internal termination.
Once the system is up and running, everything seems to work. I can read
and write tapes, position to eom, etc. with no indication of problems
in SYSLOG. I get a failure every time the Iris runs its power-up diags,
however.
The messages are something like
SC0: Unexpected Transfer Phase, State 4B Phase 31
scsi(0,7,0) transfer aborted (hardware error)
Device 7 failed DMA test
Press return to continue...
Once I continue, everthing seems fine.
I suspect that the Iris is attempting a test on the Exabyte while it
is still running its own internal diagnostics in response to a reset
when the Iris starts its power-up sequence.
Anyone have any comparable experience or advice ? I have all the
Exabyte rev levels and prom codes if that is an issue. I've set the
switches on the MX board to 1-4 up, 5-6 down as per Dave Olsen's
posting of 1/12/91.
Thanks in advance,
#include <standard_disclaimer.h>
Dave Cunningham cunning@arthur.msd.lmsc.lockheed.com
Lockheed Missiles and Space Co.
O/81-10, B/157-5E, (408)-756-1382olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson) (05/04/91)
In <1991May3.043324.26592@iscnvx.uucp> cunning@iscnvx.uucp (Dave Cunningham) writes: | Once the system is up and running, everything seems to work. I can read | and write tapes, position to eom, etc. with no indication of problems | in SYSLOG. I get a failure every time the Iris runs its power-up diags, | however. | | The messages are something like | | SC0: Unexpected Transfer Phase, State 4B Phase 31 | scsi(0,7,0) transfer aborted (hardware error) | Device 7 failed DMA test | | Press return to continue... This must be on a 4D20 or 25, since the other systems don't do much in terms of powerup scsi diags. The Exabyte drive doesn't implement the SCSI senddiagnostic command. Not only that, but after the very first byte, they just KNOW they don't implement it, so they try to go to a message in phase to tell us about it. The PROMs aren't designed to handle that, so you get the error. The currently shipping Exabytes have firmware that accepts the whole senddiag command, and THEN returns illegal request, which we know how to handle, and which is much more 'standard' for unsupported command. Anyway, setting the bootmode to C, rather than c, in the PROM monitor (setenv bootmode C) suppresses most of the scsi diags, so your system will autoboot. For the 4D35, we learned from this, and also wanted to speed up the bootup procedure, so we suppress many of the power on diags, unless bootmode is set to d (for diagnostic). Some of the early 4D20 machines don't support the bootmode C, for those you just won't be able to autoboot, but you CAN safely ignore the error. -- Dave Olson Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.