On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Stan Koper said:
John,
The Seagate uses a 50 pin cable. It's the only device on the SCSI card. The Tekram card refers to some kind of automated terminator, but as for the drive, it came with the terminator enabled by default. I left it that way.
News, tho. I did the low level format and verify, and reinstalled SuSE 7.0. Since then it's been doing some very weird stuff, but only off and on. For example, I'm getting httpd-conf errors at boot up, but not at every boot up. The warn file reports problems with PHP (3). So no surprise there. But, on some boot ups, when I go to log in, it rejects my log-in. What I mean is, I don't see the next line, "password:". As soon as I type in something and hit enter, I get "login incorrect". And sometimes that's followed by a "respawning too fast" message.
That sounds like getty is having a problem. I've seen that in happen with mgetty (used for dial-up logins and handling a fax dialup line) if it's not passed the appropriate parameters in /etc/inittab. But SuSE doesn't install mgetty to handle VC logins, so I doubt that's it. Sounds like you have several issues there. The HD problem is almost certainly a hardware issue, possibly an IRQ conflict - check the IRQ of the controller, which is viewable and changeable within the Tekram BIOS. While running, 'lspci' should show the cfg info for the pci cards, or check /var/log/boot.msg for IRQ and i/o addresses of the devices. Try removing the ethernet cards until after completing the install and running for a while. Some SCSI facts to be aware of: Length of the SCSI cable is important. For a 50-pin cable, I believe the max length is something like 6 feet (however, a practical length is more like 2 - 3 ft). For 68 pin, I believe it's less. The rule of thumb is the shorter (and thicker) the better. Another important issue is the use of a terminator. SCSI specs call for termination at both ends of the bus. Most modern controllers implement auto termination on the card, which means that it will take of the issue on the card end of the bus. OTOH, if you should happen to connect both internal and external devices (thus placing the card in the middle of the bus), you would need a terminator on the ends of each cable, and the card would remain unterminated. All that said, in many instances you can get away without a terminator, especially when you have only a single device connected with a short cable. Also take a look at the device information for the SCSI devices to look for a clue. You could try re-installing, but without using Reiserfs to see if that would make a difference. The SCSI error you originally posted was definitely a read error, which would point to: bad termination, a problem with the cable, controller or HD. I would opt for a terminator on the cable and disable the one on the drive. Check the jumpers on the drive. You prolly shouldn't have terminator power enabled on the drive either, in case it is. If you don't have the jumper info for the drive, you should be able to find it on the Seagate Internet site. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- John Karns jkarns@csd.net