topic Re: ad160 driver in ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL)

ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Mon, 02 Apr 2001 23:00:00 GMT

When installing 5.06 the system hangs after entering License number and key for sco - at the stage 'Checking system state and loading installation files'. There is an occasional led flash on all of the 4 15k 9.1 Gb drives (at the same time) in the hot swap bay and on the sdt-10000 tape drive. The defbootstr is link="ad160" hd=Sdsk Srom=wd(0,0,0) with the ad160 driver from the Compaq efs V5.38.
As a last resort I just hit return to the boot prompt so using the ad160 on the SCO 5.06 cd and the installation appears to be progressing normally. I think some message was displayed in between the Sco install screens.
Has anyone else tried this?
The disc drive cage and Tape is connected to port 1 only of the onboard 64 bit u3 controller. Its IRQ is 11. Port 2 is terminated but unused also with IRQ 11.(Disabling port 2 causes the install to panic)
Comments would be appreciated.

Clive Rhodes
Jobmaster Plc (UK)

Re: ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Mon, 02 Apr 2001 23:00:01 GMT

This seems to be normal. Check the controller boot order in the bios, make
sure the controller/channel with the drives on it is controller order one.
Sometimes you need to run the Smart Start system erase to reset the works, then follow the assisted install. The erase/assisted install MAY reset the controller order.
We normally set the tape drive on a different controller from the hard drives.

Re: ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Wed, 04 Apr 2001 23:00:00 GMT

Solution! Thanks to scoace - the reason for discs and tape on the same controller is that I need an IRQ for - dare I say a 8port pci card and irq 15 is now used for the Compaq Management facility. BUT the solution to the hang problem is that I downloaded EFS 5.38 whereas 5.38b is the latest. A bit confused about the EFS dates. EFS 5.28 sp10586 sept 9 1999, EFS sp14378 5.38b nov 1 2000, efs5.38a sp14378(again) 11 oct 2000. Thanks for your reply and to a fast response from Compaq.
Clive Rhodes

Re: ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Fri, 06 Apr 2001 23:00:00 GMT

Clive - I have attempted installs on a pair of ML350's, with no success. There
seems to be a variable I have not sorted out, because I was able to complete
an install a few weks ago. The assisted install fails ( I think ) because 5.38a
is on the 4.90 CD, which is autoloaded at the end of a SCO install. This causes
the first reboot after the install to hang at " H iinit ", which I think is
a first step in accessing the hard drive. The 5.38a BTLD causes a hang at the
same point that you observed. Only stepping through a manual installation, then
loading EFS 5.38b seemed to work. Is there various releases of SS 4.90 ?

Your PCI interrupt table differs from what I expect. My controllers share the
interrupts, as follows

FPU 13, serial 4 & 3, parallel 7, floppy 6, IDE 14, network 15, kbmouse 12,

BUT both ad160 controllers are on 11. Should leave 10 & 5 for the 8 port.

Update this when you can.

Re: ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Sun, 08 Apr 2001 23:00:00 GMT

Scoace - ad160 driver. I may have misled myself on this. I dowloaded efs 5.38b and created the BTLD floppy then installed OS5 successfully with this disk. The bad news is I installed V5.05 accidentally!! So then I tried V5.06 and it hung as usual. Using the default ad160 on the SCO cd worked ok so it looks like a problem specific to 5.06

As for IRQs suggested it all looks ok but I have in addition an IRQ taken up by the Compaq Wellness Driver - installed when the EFS is used to set up the network card and in the F9 setup the ATI Rage Controller uses yet another IRQ although not used by the SCO system.

Re: ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Sun, 08 Apr 2001 23:00:01 GMT

Finally, manual install of sco5.06 with ad160 from floppy works IF at boot:

defbootstr link="ad160" hd=Sdsk Srom=wd(0,0,0) scsi.noscan

is entered. Used this after reading on www.sco.com Technical Article TA111523 about OS 5.05 OR 5.06 hanging if installing on top of 5.05 or 5.06. Not the same conditions but hopefully this appears to work.

Clive Rhodes

Re: ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Wed, 11 Apr 2001 23:00:00 GMT

Clive - I guess one of the "variables that I haven't sorted out" is the fresh
installation of 5.0.6 over 5.0.6 . Thanks. I can get the manual install to
work, and run 5.0.6 sucessfully. When I install EFS5.38b ( from single user
mode), relink and reboot, the reboot hangs at " H iinit ". Going back to the
old kernel, removing EFS5.38b fixes the problem. Can you run EFS5.38b ?

Re: ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Mon, 16 Apr 2001 23:00:00 GMT

Scoace- no problems implementing efs5.38b(sp14378.exe on Compaq site). The file /usr/adm/messages verifies its 5.38b on the Compaq SCSI-2, Compaq Proliant Storage system, Compaq Wellness Driver and Compaq rom driver lines. Machine bios is Do4/F04 11/13/2000. Irqs used are:
13 fpu
4 serial
3 serial
6 floppy
12 kbmouse
5 cpqw compaq wellness
10 compaq onboard nic
11 ultra 3 port 1
11 ultra 3 port 2
14 ide controller
15 specialix serial card
USB is disabled in f9, ATI rage controller allows disable but keeps coming back!. Not sure about your problem except that its related to what efs 5.38b does - set up the nic and compaq wellness driver - IRQ 's?

Re: ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Mon, 30 Apr 2001 23:00:00 GMT

Clive, still not much luck with efs5.38x, but the SS 5.00 and CMA 5.00,
which has EFS 5.40, seems to work. I am having a problem with some of the
ML530's in the field, they seem to ASR after 13-14 days if they are heavily
loaded. Removing the CMA seems to correct the problem, but then you lose
all that functionality. I am retesting the new CMA version to see what happens.

Re: ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Wed, 25 Jul 2001 23:00:00 GMT

Clive,

Hope you still are in the loop. After more problems on a total of 5 ML350,
and a lot of effort from Canadian tech support, I have conformation that there
IS a problem with the Adaptec chip set and the AD160 driver. No solution as
of yet, but some machine will hang at H iinit at boot time.

scoace

Re: ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Thu, 26 Jul 2001 23:00:00 GMT

scoace - thanks for the information. I know it doesn't help your position but the only ml350 using the ad driver with discs attached (the one which caused all this in the first place) has been in use at one of our customers since April with no problems - and this reboots itself nightly!. But I am still monitoring the machine and this forum.
Cliver

Re: ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Sat, 04 Aug 2001 23:00:00 GMT

Hi Clive, are you going to Caldera Forum?
Do NOT upgrade the BIOS on your ML350, it may stop working. I had been
upgrading the machines to 03/13/01 before installing, and not having any luck.
I loaded and tested a machine with the 10/13/00 BIOS, and started having the
boot hang after the bios upgrade.

Re: ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Thu, 16 Aug 2001 23:00:00 GMT

Hi, I encounter the familiar "H iinit" problem during installation, its normally will hangs after loading the entire efs V5.42. and this only happened if I have two partition on a single drive. but if I omit the Compaq Proliant Storage System Support Driver, the system seems to work. What this driver suppose to do?

Re: ad160 driver

Ayman Altounji — Wed, 22 Aug 2001 23:00:00 GMT

Interesting... The Storage System Driver should talk to a hot swap backplane,
such as an external storage cabinet, that may report temperature or other
metrics back to the host server. Could it be that by not having two partitions
on the hard drive you are not going through SS, and not loading the Compaq
drives?