info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA (02/16/85)
From: engvax!KVC@cit-vax I just sent out one horror story on my VMS V4 upgrade last week, here's another that the list oughta know about. Does anyone else out there have 8 disk drives on one SI 9900 controller (daisy-chained) under VMS V4? After getting the SI patches for DRDRIVER, I ran the system after hours under V4 for about a week. During that time, I had no trouble with my SI equipment (7 eagles and one rm05 look-alike) except for some intermittent trouble with disk number 5 in the chain. On Saturday morning, our SI engineer found low voltages on disk number 5 and tweaked them up. The disk was now happy. Saturday afternoon, we build VMS V4 on our system disk (an RP07). After getting the patches to DRDRIVER for the Eagles, we rebooted the system and found that AUTOCONFIGURE only configured 6 out of 8 disks on the controller. This couldn't have been a software problem because we ran after hours all week with all 8 drives under VMS V4, with the same kludged DRDRIVER. Must've been the work on the Eagle that morning... Well, after checking all the cabling, we found nothing wrong. SI suggested I reset the controller and reboot. This time, it only had 4 out of 8 disk drives. Next I tried powering the controller off and back on and rebooting. Now I was down to 2 bloody drives on the $&*^%$*^% controller! This trend was not encouraging, I did not muck with the controller any more, it seemed to be trying to tell me something... At this point it had to be a hardware problem in the controller, so the SI people went to work swapping boards. That didn't seem to help. Finally, I got a brainstorm and decided to try booting with the regulation issue DRDRIVER. You cannot map the eagles correctly with it, but it will find the devices on the controller if they are there. Sure enough, the system AUTOCONFIGURED 8 drives on that controller! Rebooted with the SI mangled driver and there were now 4 drives. It's easy to blame the patches, except that I'd run with them all week at night without any trouble! Fortunately, during this fiasco we noticed that after the system autoconfigured however many drives it felt like configuring that time, you could run SYSGEN and AUTOCONFIGURE that adapter again. Each time you re-autoconfiged it, you got another drive! The drives were real too, you could mount them and all the data was intact! So, at least we have a work-around. My SYSTARTUP.COM now begins with the following lines: $ MCR SYSGEN AUTO 10 AUTO 10 AUTO 10 AUTO 10 AUTO 10 AUTO 10 Looks pretty dumb, huh... Can anyone out there explain this? It has to be something the FE did Saturday morning that confused the patched DRDRIVER, but not the real DRDRIVER. I find that awfully hard to imagine... /Kevin Carosso engvax!kvc @ CIT-VAX.ARPA Hughes Aircraft Co.