aab@cichlid.com (Andy Burgess) (11/07/90)
I just purchased an ACB-5500 to attempt to make use of about 300mb of assorted st-506 drives from PCs. The 5500 can connect to 4 st-506 drives. Apparently the first time you use the device you must tell the controller what kind of drives you have attached. It then writes this info to the drives and from then on everything works (supposedly) like any other scsi drive. The docs for the 5500 make vague mention of a generic scsi device driver that could be used to do this one time initialization. I hope to use this on a Sun SS1 (4/60). There is no /dev/scsi or mention of it in the man pages. Anyone have any ideas? Worst case I could do the setup on a PC with MSDOS but I would have to borrow one so a pure Sun solution is preferred. Thank you Andy -- Andy Burgess Independent Software Contractor aab@cichlid.com uunet!silma!cichlid!aab
matthew@cs.su.oz (Matthew Geier) (11/08/90)
In article <1990Nov6.180757.5079@cichlid.com> aab@cichlid.com (Andy Burgess) writes: >I just purchased an ACB-5500 to attempt to make use of about 300mb of >assorted st-506 drives from PCs. The 5500 can connect to 4 st-506 drives. >Apparently the first time you use the device you must tell the controller >what kind of drives you have attached. It then writes this info to the drives >and from then on everything works (supposedly) like any other scsi drive. >Andy Burgess >Independent Software Contractor >aab@cichlid.com >uunet!silma!cichlid!aab I actually have a ACB 5500 and a 4000 as well. I used them on a locally made (Australian) 68000 computer. The guy who wrote our SCSI driver , spent hours with the Adaptec technical manuals , and eventually created a special program for uploading the drive characteristics to the Adaptecs. A special SCSI message is transmitted for each ST-506 drive. Immediatly after the setup message you must then format the drive . I would assume that SUN provides a utility to send a format command. It would be unlikely that a special Adaptec utility is supplied. If it comes to the worst , you could write a program that sends a SCSI message directly onto the bus , and manually build data to be sent into the program. It only needs to be done once ! Adaptec them selves should be able to help , that wasnt an option for us , since they are on the other side of the planet ! Matthew Geier, matthew@cluster.cs.su.edu.au