karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) (07/06/89)
WARNING!!!!! Those of you who might want to use an ACB2372 as a secondary controller under Xenix or 386/ix with certain drive combinations, look out! We just had a nice experience -- the board will function with either a ST277R, or a ST4144, but with BOTH drives connected the following happens: (Drive 0 = ST4144, Drive 1 = ST277R) 1) If you switch from drive 0 to drive 1, then try to switch back, you get nothing but R/W errors from that point forward on drive 0! 2) If you get an error on drive 1 (say, during a "mkdev hd 1 1" while scanning the disk) EVERY block after that will be read in error; in addition, some I/O calls appear to be directed to the wrong device! (We only tried reads; I'm not brave or stupid enough to try write()s in this situation :-) 3) EITHER drive will work after a power-on cold boot, as long as you never access the other drive! If you change select (ie: from drive 0 to drive 1 or back), then you are instantly hosed. Needless to say, this makes the board worthless for 4-drive installations. If you hook up the second drive you are hosed as soon as you mount the partitions on that disk! I am pretty certain it is something wierd in the controller for the simple reason that a warm boot (ie: haltsys/<return> to reboot) does NOT clear the problem. Power cycling both the machine and external disk enclosure DOES clear the trouble. Secondly, the controller knows whether there are one or two drives online -- the "disk activity" light on the drive behaves MARKEDLY different depending on whether one or two drives are connected. With one drive the light is an ACTIVITY indicator -- with TWO drives connected you get the common "drive is selected" indication from the light on the front of the drive itself! This is not related to the internal BIOS -- I have that disabled as this is a secondary controller. Adaptec said "tough luck" on this one -- they asked if I had the ST4144 jumper installed (point 4 on J14); I said yes. They said "well, then don't use our board". Thanks....that was an impressive answer. STAY AWAY FROM ADAPTEC 2372s as secondary controllers on Xenix systems if you want to use two drives on it! I'm finding a nice big trash can to toss this one into and getting out my soldering iron for the spare WD1006 we have laying around. We've seen this problem fleetingly before when we were using it as a primary controller under Microport, but wrote it off as a bug in the Microport drivers. I guess it's more a problem in the board itself. Sheesh. (Finally, does anyone know where I can find another board which will (1) work, and (2) can be jumpered as a secondary controller? I can hack up a WD1006-V/SR2 to do the job, but hate the thought of having to cut traces and run jumper wires around! Don't suggest DPT -- I don't want to spend $1500!) (SCO, have you had any other reports on this one?) -- Karl Denninger (karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM, <well-connected>!ddsw1!karl) Public Access Data Line: [+1 312 566-8911], Voice: [+1 312 566-8910] Macro Computer Solutions, Inc. "Quality Solutions at a Fair Price"