curious if a compaq drive will work on a sparc 5

[johndog]

I have a compaq 18.2gb wide scsi drive, that I think is SCSI3 from what I looked up. It's model number is: bd0186349b. It goes undetected in the sparc 5 when I do a probe-scsi command at the OK prompt. I've tried different jumper settings and that didn't work either. I can't tell if the drive is spinning or not, but the green LED on it was flashing. I'm just wondering if it is too large a drive for a sparc 5, if the ROM chip could be flashed to handle it, or if it's just incompatable with a sparc 5. Thanks.

 

[SamBones]

Do you mean a SPARCstation 5 or an Ultra 5?

If you mean a SPARCstation 5, I don't think it will work in the internal drive bay. I believe that's an old narrow SCSI 1 interface. You might be able to use it in an external enclosure using an 80 to 50 pin converter.

If you mean you have an Ultra 5, then it should go right in and work.

Hope this helps.

 

[tuka]

Ultra 5 has internal IDE disks
SparcStation 5 has internal SCSI disks

BD0186340B is an Ultra3 SCSI disk.

You stated you changed the jumpers on the disk, why don't you remove your orignal disk)s) then install the compaq disk and do a probe-scsi. This will insure you don't have an addressing conflict.

Sunsolve is presently unreachable whenever I can get on the site I will look around and get back to you.

 

[johndog]

Yes, it is a SparcStation 5, not Ultra 5. I will have to try the probe-scsi command again after removing the other drives. The Compaq's SCSI connection does work, it plugs right into the SCSI bus. I'm not sure if making it external would changed anything. However, it sounds like the drive is not spinning, but the LED flashes. Any more help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Chacalinc]

Try to get the jumper configuration for the disk drive. Remember, all SCSI disk have a jumper to set the "start at power-on" or "start by command"... by default it start by power-on, but if you try several jumper seting may be you move this one.

Another seting is the "terminator" for the bus... by default they are terminated (end the SCSI bus), but (again) may be you get the terminator (another jumper). If this drive is the only one, it should be terminated, if you have more drives on the same bus (CD, Tapes, Disks, etc.) the last device must be terminated.

Hope this help you.

 

[tuka]

If you place the drive inside the sparc 5 it will self terminate! As far as the start at power on jumper you can try but the probe-scsi command should activate the drive to start spinning .

 

[Chacalinc]

I didn't know that, thanks for the info... (I'm a storage specialist, not server).

May be, you can have a HW or firmware (disk) incompatibility.

Sorry, I declare myself incompetent on this issue.

 

[johndog]

The probe-scsi command never seemed to get the disk spinning. Also, I don't have any jumpers set on the drive currently. I think the problem resides on the face that it's an UltraWide SCSI3 drive. I don't think that the Sparcstation 5 can support this type. Also, it looks as if the SCSI connector has a few more goldfinger pins on it's connection than the smaller SCSI2 drives do, although the plastic connection is the same size. Any hints?

 

[tuka]

Generally SCSI devices are backward compatible.
The Sparc5 has a fast SCSI-2 interface (8 bits address)
The difference in the connector size is probably due to 8 and 16 bits addressing differences.

Can you look at the disk spec's sheet for all the jumper configurations and pay attention to autospin, termination,device addressing and interface selection (such as forced single end).