SCSI on a PC

[melott]

I'm putting togather a PC.
Its a Pent. 350, using a bunch of stuff I have.

I'm using a Adaptec 1510/1520 SCSI card.
And yes I know its old, but its what I have.
The card is good because I was able to
reconize and format a Seagate 1 gig drive.
I also have a IBM 4.2 gig drive that I was/am
going to use.
The question is does this card have a 4 gig
limit or something like that?? Also I heard
that on some PC's the hard drive can be password
protected. I bought this drive used and have no
idea what it came out of.
The problem is that the system sees
the drive and hardware config says the drive is
working correctly. But when I try to low-level
format it I get an error from Adaptec's SCSIFMT
formatting software.
The errors are.....
CDB   04 ......
Target  02- Check Command
all the other areas are zeros so I assume they
are OK.
I've had this drive for some time and was never
able to get it to format on my A3k ether.
I'm just not convinced that this drive is bad.
As I said, I formatted a Seagate 1 gig with it so
the problem is with the IBM drive.
Has anyone had any experience with this kind
of thing ??
 

[adolescent]

Some drives don't like to be low level formatted, and it's usually not necessary (unless you wanted to change the block size).  Have you tried creating partitions on it?

[melott]

No.. I can't partition it.
I can't even see whats on it even thought
hardware says its OK.
Thats why I was wondering about a Password
protection thing. I suspect something like this
is the problem here. The question here is how
do I get into this drive to fix whatever is wrong??
I would try IBM tech support but they take
forever to respond.
Any suggestions there ??

[Wain]

Password protection wouldn't stop it from being able to be low-level formatted, especially on an A3k, which is not going to recognize PC password schemes.  If you're using the SCSI BIOS, or whatever the equivalent on your card is to attempt a low-level, and you're getting errors, it's probably the drive, the cable, or the controller card.  I'd call Adaptec and find out what the error code means, their tech-support is wonderful in my experience.

also, a drive can easily be failing but still ID and sometimes even SCAM itself on the SCSI chain.  I've had harddrives before that would register as though the hardware was working, and would ID properly, but I couldn't low-level them, or anything else because the drive was in fact damaged.

Double check your SCSI cable.  Double check your controller, but it's probably a bad drive if it wouldn't work on your A3k either.

[B00tDisk]

melott wrote:
No.. I can't partition it.
I can't even see whats on it even thought
hardware says its OK.
Thats why I was wondering about a Password
protection thing. I suspect something like this
is the problem here. The question here is how
do I get into this drive to fix whatever is wrong??
I would try IBM tech support but they take
forever to respond.
Any suggestions there ??

What you need to keep in mind is that as long as the controller is still operational, even if the whole disk assembly has gone bad, the interface (be it IDE or SCSI) will report back that there's a drive there - because it's going straight to the drive's controller chips for the information.

Additionally, if you can't format the drive with the SCSI utils built into the SCSI controller (1510/20's a nice old card, btw), then odds are you've got a sour drive.

They go for like $5 +S&H.  I'd pitch it.