I have a SCSI card (an old Iomega Jaz Jet), well, for the hell of it.

Yesterday, I finally got something to attach to it, an old Seagate ST410800N (5.25" full-height, 10.8Gb hard disc!)

Now here's where it gets interesting:

The drive manages to halt any attempts to boot.

Boot from IDE had disc stops after flashing the light briefly. Doesn't reach "Loading Windows... (bar)" thing.

Boot from Linux boot CD gets to lilo prompt, then once it loads image, you get a blinking cursor only.

I'd expect that early in the boot process, there'd be nothing even talking to the drive.


I've tried diddling with termination jumpers and SCSI ID to no avail.

It does identify itself, with a line during the SCSI card's BIOS:

"ID #0: Seagate ST410800N 0025 Drive=80h" (or #2 depending how I jumpered it)

I'd be happy to just be able to boot with the drive connected so I can wipe and test it. I think a huge, extremely loud disc drive (I haven't heard a drive that loud since I ditched the 20Mb 3.5x1" MiniScribe) isn't for me, but I bet there's someone in the local LUG who'd appreciate the novelty; they meet tonight and I'd leave it on the 'to take away' table.

Anyone seen this before?

Did you get the drive with the card? You have to terminate the cable... I'm guessing this is a 50-pin card? Some older drives actually have switches on them to activate termination, and REALLY old ones have removable resistors. You could probably look up the drive's specs online and figure it out. If that still doesn't work, then I'd suspect the card or the drive as being bad.

Drive and card were purchased seperately; the interface is 50-pin.

I tried it with the jumper identified by Seagate as 'termination enable' on and off.

The Seagate page mentions some models had physically-removable terminator packs; I don't see any (or suitable sockets)

It seems like the problem's unusually big-- I'd think even a completely misconfigured SCSI chain wouldn't affect attempts to boot from the IDE side, or a bunk drive (it's possible the drive's bad, but I'd still expect to be able to boot and diagnose.)

I know with my computer, it does weird stuff when I put SCSI or SATA cards in it... when you attatch a drive to it, the card installs a bootable BIOS, which often overrides the default boot disk, but it allows you to boot from the card. With my card, if no drives are attatched, it says "No drives found, not installing BIOS" and works normally. If it finds a drive, it'll say "Drives found at ID#0, BIOS installed" and then it boots ONLY from the card unless I tell it to otherwise. You can change which SCSI ID it tries to boot from in the card's setup menu, if it has one.

Don't know if this helps, but let us know how it goes. Might help if I knew which card it was, too... sometimes the Iomega cards were kinda flaky.

I'm guessing that Iomega card does not support larger hard drives.

What's the card model number?

If it's an ISA card, look here:

https://iomega-na-en.custhelp.com/cg...&p_faqid=1217&

"Extended translation supports up to eight (8) gigabytes per disk"

o.O

It's the PCI one, but that one's also limited to 8Gb drives. Mystery solved, perhaps.

dumb question... did you terminate the scsi cable?

I set the "Termination enable" jumper on the drive. Is there more to terminating an internal drive chain than that?

Quote: Originally Posted by Hak Foo I set the "Termination enable" jumper on the drive. Is there more to terminating an internal drive chain than that?

Well, in most cases , if your cable has more than one device connector the connector at the end needs a termonator block plugged into it

If the drive has a "TERM" jumper, then that works as a terminator if it's the last device on the chain.

Perhaps this will help:

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/...csi/e8850b.pdf