LHii - Problem w/Hot Swap Drives

[C. D. Tobola]

I'm running an LHii that has six hot-swap drives. Since the built-in SCSI adapter died, I added an Adaptec AHA-3490.

Here's the problem. If I pull the drives on Channel A, and just run the 3 on Channel B (which also includes the CD-Rom and the tape drive), everything boots okay and I can format all three drives.

If I plug in the drives on Channel A, the system runs into problems. The error I get (when installing Linux) is that there's no partition table for the drives.

The system will generally build a partition table for the first drive, but when it gets to the second drive, I get an error that it can't proceed.

If I try to unplug the second and third drives on Channel A, the system doesn't give an error... but the drive never appears in the partitioning utility.

I've made sure there are no SCSI conflicts and that the drives are all working.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

-Cloy

[Marino Meloni_1]

hello Cloy,
I do not know if you may run in trouble with the HBA itself or with the drivers, but related to the SCSI devices, as the Hotswap cage is SE FW, try to fix the troughput of your scsi card to 40 or 20 Mb at the Bios level, this will prevent to have disk trying to communicate faster.

Also be sure your drives are SE drives or have the jumper set in order to force them in SE mode

marino

[C. D. Tobola]

Another interesting problem has arise, which may be related to this.

Whenever I try to boot from the Navigator CD (and it is the correct CD), I get a message saying that the "booted CD-ROM does not support this HP NetServer."

The CD works... it loads up Linux just fine.

Any suggestions on this new wrinkle would be appreciated.

-Cloy

[e4services]

I guess my first reply did not "stick".
I agree with the first response, the controllers channel is having problems with the single end mode of the HDs. The original SCSI Bus is SE, not LVD. THe drives for your unit are always supplied as SE SCSI Bus drives, so I would assume that they are unless you replaced the hard disk.
Not knowing the controller, make sure there is no jumper or ROM setting through software to configure the channel to Single End Bus and not LVD Bus. Also, HP used the bus terminator to control this, so make sure the terminator is an SE terminator.
As for you CD, you can not boot from a CD that does not exist on the System Board BIOS, which it now longer does. Replace it with an IDE.
Mark