wierd hardware problem

[John Henrikson]

Hello,
I have an old D250 that I'm trying to put to some good use.. I added 2 external drives to it, and a tape drive. (ioscan attached).
However when I try to boot to re-install the operating system from either an ignite tape or a cd the process fails to load with the message Exec failed.
Any ideas what I should try next??
MANY thanks for your help!

[Ravi_8]

Hi,

If you have ignite server

ISL> boot lan. install

[Helen French]

Are you sure that the CD and the tapes are working? Attach only minimum devices (CD, disks, tape etc) needed first and try again. Check "search" command from boot console menu and see it's detecting all disks, cd drives and tape drives.

[John J Read]

Just checking.. Is your Ignite tape compatible with your hardware? Ie, did you make a 64bit OS tape and are trying to put it on a server that can only accept 32bit?

[John Henrikson]

When I do the search command from the boot menu it does display all the devices, that is both the tape drive and the cd drive.. it just won't Boot from them!
I don't have an ignite server..
thanks for your help every one..

[Ravi_8]

Hi,

Could you try install with another OS CD if you have.

[Helen French]

Does it only shows the CD drive and tape drive? What about the disks? If it doesn't show the disks, then the installation will fail because it cannot find a device to install the OS.

[Eugeny Brychkov]

John,
reboot server, get into PDC, insert tape to DDS drive and CD into CDROM drive and issue
sea ipl
command. It should show you all the devices with bootable header.
If you really sure that CD and tape are bootable ones then check SE cabling (where CDROM and tape drive are located) inside server. Cable should be terminated at the end, and not over-terminated (not terminated at the SCSI devices). PDC's 'dumb' SCSI driver is very critical to such issues
Eugeny

[Eugeny Brychkov]

Sorry did not notice it before - disconnect all devices from SE external bus (disks) and put terminator there. Maybe it will solve your current issue?
Eugeny

[Cheryl Griffin]

Your ioscan is short. Can you post:
# ioscan -fnC tape

exec failed seems to indicate hardware.
D-Class has a HSC, so the tape drive would use stape as the driver. I need the rest of the ioscan to see what's going on.

exec failed messages are normally followed up by a number, like -3, -4, -7. Did you get a number in the message?

Next, was the image made from another Dclass? I don't think it got this far into the tape, but am curious.
Cheryl

[Cheryl Griffin · Accepted solution]

One last thing, if the tape drive and the cdrom are off the same bus, and are behaving the same way, you need to check your termination.

If Martha Stewart did unix support, she'd say "It's a scsi thing."
Cheryl

[John Henrikson]

YES!
that external drive had an error in its termination..
now everything seems to be working well, even the make recovery tape that I made earlier..
thanks..
John