Symbios SCSI issues

[Matthew J. Brodeur]

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On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Ben Boulanger wrote:

> I wouldn't think the System BIOS's setting for booting would have an 
> impact on whether the SCSI BIOS would detect drives.. am I wrong there?  

   I honestly don't know.  I'd assume it only affects whether the SCSI 
BIOS itself gets detected.  Worth checking, though.


> The SCSI BIOS has no way (that I can find) to manually set termination.  I 
> can enable or disable SCAM (disabled currently), and I've tried it both 
> ways.  Disabled should be the correct setting here, right?

   My experience with SCAM (on an Adaptec card) was that it didn't play
well with the older Adaptec driver.  Other cards/drivers might work, but
it's safe to leave it off.  I'd be surprised if there was no way to set
termination on the card.  I haven't used the card in question, but on
others I've found the option buried in one of the special "experts-only"
menus.
   However a quick Google turned up this page:
http://www.bellmicro.com/fibrechannel/newasp/lsi_hba/downloads/sym22802.pdf
   ...which seems to indicate that this card ONLY does auto-termination.  
Now here's a dumb question, have you enabled the "Scan for device at boot" 
option for each drive you have?


> Despite all of this - The SCSI BIOS needs to detect the drives prior to
> any OS talking to it. I can't boot with a CDROM boot image and force the
> SCSI card to detect the drives if the BIOS can't see them at all, can I?

   Well, maybe.  The card's BIOS detection is only necessary if you need 
to boot from an attached drive, which is your ultimate goal.  The kernel 
driver does its own detection routine that, AFAIK, ignores what the BIOS 
found.  In this case, if a rescue disk finds the drive(s) and allows you 
to access them you'll know it's a BIOS setting and not a hardware problem.  
OTOH, if the driver loads and finds nothing I'd begin to suspect the 
card/cabling/termination.
   Of course, this all assumes you have a non-SCSI device to rescue boot 
from.


- -- 
Matthew J. Brodeur                                             RHCE, GSEC
MBrodeur at NextTime.com                             http://www.NextTime.com

He who laughs last thinks slowest. 
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