Hello again,
I have not solved my boot problem and I am going to trouble you all again
with it because I would like to get to the bottom of it. I wouldn't call
myself a SCSI expert, but I have been building and repairing all-SCSI
systems for over 10 years now and this problem is troubling.
To recapitulate, in the meantime I have had three SCSI hard disks become
unbootable, i.e. the bios recognizes them as boot disks or partitions but
they will not boot in spite of the boot files being present. The SCSI
parameters in the bios setup are all correct (disk id "0" as the boot
disk, SCSI host-adapter bios installed, etc.), boot partition active, MBR
freshly written, etc. Another SCSI disk with the ID set to "0" will boot
fine! The disk can only be made bootable by low-level formatting from the
scsi bios utility. After that it can be repartitioned, formatted and any
operating system can be installed (OS/2, Linux, NT, W95, PC-DOS)and will
boot. Before low-level formatting any of these OSes can be installed but
none can be made to boot the machine. No data is lost on the disks except
for the MBR or boot sector itself...(?).
All of the machines involved have MoBos with onboard Adaptec ultrawide
SCSI adapters (AIC 7880 = AHA2940UW) and have worked perfectly until this
problem has arisen. One of the disks was a Fujitsu M2624FA SCSI II, one an
IBM DORS and the 3rd an IBM DCAS UW. The third disk was subjected to
operation for a short while without the SCSI bus being terminated or
having term power. Could this really mess up the disk geometry so badly
that the boot sector gets lost?
None of the antivirus programs I have (IBM, McAfee, F-Prot) show the
presence of a boot partition virus or any other virus.
Can anyone make any suggestions as to what is happening. If you need more
data feel free to write to me directly rather than to the list. I will
respond to the list if I find out what is happening.
Thanks again in advance,
Bruce
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Bruce Boschek - Institute of Medical Virology
Justus-Liebig-University - Giessen, Germany
Brought to you through IBM OS/2 Warp 4
and MR/2 ICE (Reg. #19501)
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