SCSI III External chasis quandry

[J-Golden]

Hey happy campers!  This is what I'm hacking today with some success.

I took a SCSI III Aray out of an IBM SERVER (hot swapable, technacly) that holds 6 drives.  Heres the prob.  My PPC card sees only one drive and it keeps spouting something about serial error at me.

Now I will admit that there was several other cables hanging off the thing and one of them looks to be a serial-esque cable.  Can I not use this at all without that data handler type connection.

This is over my head so you hard core techies could be a big help to me.

TANKZ! in advance!!!!!

[Sparky]

Hi there,

Now does this array have a RAID controller or is it just a bunch of drives ?

How are you cabling it up ?  Do you have the termination correct ? (both ends!)

Got good cables ?

Regards

Mark

[J-Golden]

Sparky wrote:
Hi there,

Now does this array have a RAID controller or is it just a bunch of drives ?

it's a chasis that sldes the drives in and out.  It WAS hooked up to a raid card but you could set it up as individual drives as well.....

How are you cabling it up ?  Do you have the termination correct ? (both ends!)

I believe the termination is correct because my internal hard drives are seen fine (they are sitting next to the others as I don't have exactly everything I need for the external connection).

Got good cables ?

They worked fine before.  and like I said, my original HDs on the same chain are read fine...

Regards

Mark

Thanks for the run down and I hope the description of the rack mount like system helps.....

J-Golden

[Sparky]

OK think I have a picture in my head now :-)

Have you checked the ID numbers of the drives ?
Have you made sure that none of the drives have there on-board termination set ?
Are any of the drives providing termination power to the bus ? (TERM POWER ... you need at least one drive providing it)
What drives are they ?
Just to be sure, do you have the terminators in the right places ? :-)
Are all the drives powered ? :-)
Are all the drives in the drive tray connected up OK ?
Is the drive tray earthed ? (ie. is it screwed into your case ?)

You came for answer and got more questions! :-)

Mark

[Floid]

Your best bet would be to find the FRU and find the IBM documentation.  Most of this stuff is described online, if you know where to look.

Off the top of my head, the "serial-esque" cable could be anything from a monitoring link, to a connection to control a hardware RAID controller in the array, to a breakout of some form or another to a panel or device that would've set the options for the device, but these are all wild guesses.

As to the trouble experienced, if you're quite convinced it's all straight-through and nothing's goofily differential ('-III' to me would indicate UW SE, or U2W and so on LVD that should fall back to SE, but I can't remember if there's anything weird to be aware of as to differing pinouts on external connectors/cables)... I'd expect the drives in such a rack to come set for S.C.A.M. by default (SCSI Configuration Auto-Magically), and perhaps that's not working out for you.

(Note that SCAM theoretically disappeared from 'SCSI-3'/'SPI-3,' but since 'SCSI-3' doesn't mean much of anything... that factoid doesn't mean anything.  If the drives are jumpered for SCAM, obviously they attempt to support SCAM.)