stan@wet.UUCP (Stan Osborne) (08/18/89)
We bought a N3002-1 (660Mb) disk from NeXT. They shipped us a
Maxtor disk in its original box. No documentation, no power supply,
no metal enclosure to put it in, and no cables. They (NeXT sales) had
warned us that this is what they would do. At the time we ordered the disk
they recommended we order a specific enclosure with power supply and
cables from Gigamation. We ordered an enclosure about the same time
as the disk.
Getting Gigamation to ship the enclosure to us took some time.
SFSU had sent them a purchase order. Gigamation wanted COD. SFSU
(the State of California) does not do COD orders. Gigamation called
our purchasing agent. Our agent did not call back. Many months went
by. We were finally able to figure out what was going on and to get
our purchasing agent to convince Gigamation to ship the enclosure.
Most likely Gigamation was assured they would get their money.
The box arrived. Still no documentation. A student-assistant technician
called Gigamation for help on installing the disk in the box since there
was no documentation on how to do it. They said that installing the disk
was NeXT's responsibility. Our NeXT support technician called NeXT for help.
NeXT, to their knowledge, never called back. So I got involved in getting the
disk in its box.
I called NeXT. First I talk with a Sales assistant. They wanted me to
go through our campus NeXT support person. I explained that calls had
already been placed with NeXT. I also explained it was unlikely our NeXT
support person could do any better, since there was no documentation provided
and they had little experience fixing things without documentation.
The NeXT sales associate with a little bit of persuasion transferred me
to a support technician (Jimmy Quan) who was helpful. After a few
tests over two days and calling Mr. Quan back a few times, I was able to
get the disk installed in its box and to get it initialized and mounted
on one of our NeXT systems.
The following things were done to get the disk working:
1. Attach a jumper to jumper position J36. Since no jumper was supplied
it is necessary to find one.
I found one on a surplus circuit board which had already had its
memory chips removed. J36 is on the bottom of the disk drive.
There are many jumper positions on the bottom. Make sure you use
the right one.
According to Mr. Quan, NeXT removes this jumper before shipping the
disk. When the disk is installed inside the cube, this jumper
is removed.
2. Connect the Unit Select cable: A six pin female connector with only
five wires. One socket is free. This matches a five pin male
connector on the disk.
3. Connect the Red LED cable: A two pin female connector. This connects
with the middle two pins of the only 10 pin connector on the disk.
(The cable was so short I disconnected it from the back of the
LED first. The last thing before sealing up the box is
to reconnect the cable to the LED.)
4. Connect the obvious cables: Power and 50 wire flat ribbon.
5. Attach the disk to the bottom plate of the box. Connect the Red LED
cable to the LED. Then attach the bottom plate to the cover. Thank
goodness, screws are provided.
6. Attach the disk to the cube following the documentation provided
by NeXT on how to attach an additional disk drive. A SCSI cable
and terminator for doing this was provided by Gigamation.
7. When the system is rebooted, you will see that the startup software
finds the newly attached disk drive. It is advisable to boot single user
first so the "disk" utility can be run with out interference to
initialize the disk.
We would have been stuck wasting a lot more time if the NeXT sales associate
I spoke with, and Mr. Quan had followed NeXT's official policy for support
to Universities. The need for any support at all could have been prevented,
if the disk came with the J36 jumper in, a few pages of documentation
showing the pin assignments for all the disk's connectors, and a
statement explaining when J36 should be removed.
I don't think NeXT has shipped many add on disks for use with systems
that already have a hard disk. We are glad that in spite of this, our disk
is installed and working correctly many weeks before the start of the
Fall semester.