SERRER@NRCM3.NRC.CA (Martin Serrer) (07/24/90)
Hello and help, I have an IRIS 4D50/GT, prom monitor version 4D1-3.0 with a 170 MegaByte SCSI disk. Last week my only disk on the system broke. And as Murphy's Law dictates, I cancelled the hardware part of my service contract a few months ago to 'save the Canadian Gov't some money. ;-} Anyway, I had a Maxtor LXT200S 3.5" drive laying around and decided that I might use that. HA! The situation now is that, stand-alone fx will format the drive without complaint using the 'auto' option. (it will not let me turn on the automatic bad block revectoring or the caching. but I'm not sure if that's a problem) However when I then try to install IRIX on this newly formatted disk I get the following... >> boot -f tpsc(,7,)sash.IP4 --m Copying installation program to disk ........................................................... ........................................................... ........................................................... .......Copy complete 661600dk(0,1,1)(4) Hardware error: Internal controller error. dksc(0,0,1)unix.IP4: short read couldn't load dksc(0,1,1)unix.IP4 Unable to continue; press Enter to return to menu: Exception: <vector=NORMAL> Exception pc: 0xc021 (register dumps and other curiosities) HELP! Can anyone shed some light on what I am doing wrong? (other than the sacrilege of trying to install a 3rd party drive) I spoke to the hotline and a local field engineer and they were sympathetic but bottom line was "You didn't get it from us so we can't help you" Has anyone successfully installed a 3rd party drive in an IRIS as the system disk? Does anyone have a list of drives that work? Why isn't the SCSI standard 'standard' :-{ Any help will be greatly appreciated. Martin +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Martin Serrer Systems Lab., Bldg. M3, Montreal Rd.| | 613-993-9442 (Bell) National Research Council of Canada,| | serrer@syslab.nrc.ca (E-mail) Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A-0R6 | +--------------- If my computer is a car, I don't want a roof ----------------+
olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson) (07/25/90)
In <5E3D2439B2BF00156B@NRCNET.NRC.CA> SERRER@NRCM3.NRC.CA (Martin Serrer) writes: | Hello and help, | | I have an IRIS 4D50/GT, prom monitor version 4D1-3.0 with a 170 MegaByte SCSI | disk. | Last week my only disk on the system broke. And as Murphy's Law dictates, I | cancelled the hardware part of my service contract a few months ago to 'save the | Canadian Gov't some money. ;-} | Anyway, I had a Maxtor LXT200S 3.5" drive laying around and decided that I | might use that. HA! | The situation now is that, stand-alone fx will format the drive without | complaint using the 'auto' option. (it will not let me turn on the automatic bad | block revectoring or the caching. but I'm not sure if that's a problem) | However when I then try to install IRIX on this newly formatted disk I get the | following... | | >> boot -f tpsc(,7,)sash.IP4 --m | Copying installation program to disk | ........................................................... | ........................................................... | ........................................................... | .......Copy complete | | 661600dk(0,1,1)(4) Hardware error: Internal controller error. | dksc(0,0,1)unix.IP4: short read | couldn't load dksc(0,1,1)unix.IP4 | Unable to continue; press Enter to return to menu: | My guess is that the drive is reporting recovered errors, and the standalone drivers don't expect to deal with them. Run fx again, and make sure that 'report recovered errors' is disabled. If the drive is truly reporting an internal controller error, then you should check to see if the drive manual tells you what circumstances cause this (most don't). Even if it is a recoverable error, and internal controller error is something to be seriously concerned about. I would take it back to your supplier and try another drive of the same type. In general, drives that are sold mainly into the Mac and PC markets TEND (not all of them) to be further from the common command set than drives sold into the workstation market. Newer (design-wise) drives like the Maxtor 200S) don't usually have this problem. I HAVE used the Maxtor 200s on several systems in-house for qualification purposes, and haven't noticed any problems of the type that you are reporting, but then I haven't tried to boot them on non-PI machines. -- Dave Olson Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.