C1556D External DAT24e

[Lawrence McNamara]

Win2k backup (also TapeWare and Veritas)hangs after about 4 minutes in operation then after 11 minutes reports a "operation not completed due to device timeout". I'm trying to back up my Omnibook 4150 that's running Win2K SP2 using an Adaptec SlimSCSI. I know it's not the actual DAT drive at fault because it works perfectly with my Vectra Vl800 also using an Adaptec SCSI card and running Win2K SP2. I've checked the drivers and they are identical on both systems. I've tried the Adaptec and Microsoft web sites and neither have any information on this particular problem.
Can anyone out there help 'cos I'm getting paranoid about not being able to completely backup the laptop that contains a lot of vital information !!

[Arimo Laine_1]

Hello.

Set the SCSI bus to:

Speed 10MB/s, No Wide or Sync negotiation, No Domain Validation.

Check the drivers again. The driver for SlimSCSI card and a PCI SCSI controller is not the same!

Without knowing your SlimSCSI adapter model it's quite impossible to give you complete answer, but check Adaptec website again for compatibility and more info. Not all SlimSCSI products are compatible with all OS:s.

Arimo

[Lawrence McNamara]

Hello Arimo,

Thanks for your response. The Adaptec SlimSCSI is a 1480A UltraSCSI. The drivers on both machines are those supplied with Win2K

4mmdat.sys driver version 5.0.2183.1
aic78xx.sys driver version 5.0.2183.1

Not being ultra techie I don't know how to change the SCSI speed and there is nothing in the manual that came with the card to tell me how. I did try with the drivers from the Adaptec site for the SCSI and the HP site for the C1556D but these made no difference so I went back to the original ones.


Lawrence

[Marino Meloni_1]

to change scsi speed connection you have to pres Ctrl A at boot time, when the firmware is inizializing, If the asaptec banner didn't appear, (it may be desabled) pres Ctrl A just after memory test, repeat it also few time until you get access to the scsi bios.
bye

marino

[Lawrence McNamara]

Hello Marino,

I tried that but CTRL A does nothing at any point in the boot sequence. Pressing F2 at boot does get me into the configuration menus but none of the PCI devices are shown anywhere in any of the menus nor are the banners shown during the startup ( all the other devices are shown but not the PCI devices).


Lawrence

[David Ruska]

CNTL-A won't do anything at boot time for the 1480 card - there's no BIOS to talk to. You CAN change some of the driver parameters in the 'settings' tab in device manager (win 9x only). In win2k, you need to edit the registry.

See the Adaptec Windows 2000 driver set README file for information on configurable parameters.

[Lawrence McNamara]

Hello,

I have received information from Adaptec that highlights the probable cause of the problem. They say that the SCSI should not share the same interrupt as other devices, in my case the Matrox video shares the same IRQ as the Adaptec SCSI and could very well be the root of the problem because the Matrox driver was updated with drivers from Windows Update at the same time that I installed Win2K SP2 and the backup has not worked since then.

This now gives me another problem that probably can't be solved easily. The BIOS that's installed on the Omnibook 4150B does not give access to the IRQ settings. I think this is because it's a non-ACPI BIOS (CK.M3.05), the machine was delivered with NT4 and shortly afterwards updated to Win2K. The HP website says that to upgrade to an ACPI BIOS the machine must not be running Win2K. I really don't want to de-install Win2K and re-install NT4 so I guess I'm now stuck.

Lawrence