SCSI backplane assistance please

[Joel Viers]

Greetings!
I have purchased a used 387090-001 Compaq SCSI backplane for 4 hot-swap 80-pin drives. This is installed in an Win XP SP2 machine with 2g RAM, Athlon X2 3800, approx. 1200g drive space, and all updates current. I have also purchased 4 Fujitsu SCSI LVD U160 drives to go with this, and have an Adaptec 29160 to plug them into. Everything hooks up fine, and when I boot (the SCSI drives are not now boot drives) the drives spin up and the LEDs wink a bit but they are not recognized. I suspect that I need a jumper diagram. There are no jumpers currently installed, which should leave these drives at ID 0. I can hook up a couple of Cheetah 64-pin drives directly to the Adaptec and they work fine. Anyway, I have searched the HP site and the Internet but with no luck yet. I can find the replacement part and a list of servers which used this backplane but I find no applicable manuals, diagrams, instructions, etc. yet. Can someone help with this? I would sure appreciate the time and effort; cheers, Joel

[chongkan]

There are no jumpers or configuration needed, what is happening is that HP parts are designed to work on HP servers and not all HP servers, each part is designed for one or more servers but not for all of them and definetely not for any Personal Computer

Win XP SP2 machine with 2g RAM, Athlon X2 3800

[Brian_Murdoch]

Hi Joel,

The backplane may be a Compaq product but I've done the same with the 6-slot version with some success in the past.

I assume your backplane is as follows: -

http://partsurfer.hp.com/cgi-bin/spi/showphoto?partnumber=387090-001

Make sure you only use a point-to-point cable from the Adaptec port to the backplane, i.e. a cable with only two 68 pin connectors (one at each end) with no terminator, as the backplane has it's own termination. Also I assume you are using Compaq disk drive cradles to hold your Fujitsu drives with the 80 pin SCA connectors at the back of the cradles. Each slot has its own fixed SCSI ID so don't add SCSI jumpers.
You may need to go into the Adaptec configuration (CTRL-A) and enable the "Send Start Unit Command" for the first 4 SCSI ID's to allow the drives to spin up.

I'm fairly sure that you should get it working after a little modification.

I hope this helps.

Brian

[Joel Viers]

Greetings -

I apologize for the delay in responding to the kind help. Thanks Brian, yes your photo was spot-on. I was able to get the drives working, but not all of them were recognized at the same time. It is possible it is an issue with them being different sizes--two 18gig and two 36gig (all 15k RPM). Anyway, it looks like I may pass on this setup, replacing it with a simpler one of one large SCSI 68-pin drive. The four drives, in addition to the existing 8, took up quite a bit of space, and talk about hot--I did not realize how hot these things got, particularly when crammed together as they are when hooked up to the backplane; they got pretty much too hot to touch.

I believe in most cases things can be made to work, and I'm usually successful at doing so. And I appreciate your belief so as well. Thanks again; cheers, Joel

[Joel Viers]

I was partially successful at getting the setup to work, enough so that I believe it could, with a little more tinkering, work well. However, I will most likely replace this setup with a simpler one so the question is moot.