At 06:11 1/22/2000 , you wrote: >David G wrote: >>Just to confirm, you understand that on most SCSI drives the three >>ID jumpers are numbered 0/1/2, but their *values* are 1/2/4 -- the >>actual ID being the sum of the values of the jumpers installed. >>Could this be why your IBM drive is addressed this way? >No I didn't know that...Now I seem to have developed a possible bad >Cheetah. After leaving things on to run Seti in the background >overnight, I went to wake up the monitor this morning. Nothing >happened. The monitor lamp changed to green as it should, but I got >no display at all. Maybe a power saving setting? Do you have the drive set to spin down? (If you have EZSCSI4 you can do that. If it's a Win9X power setting, I cannot help since I always disable this in both the motherboard BIOS and Win9X Device Manager. Run SCSI Explorer (installs with Adaptec's full EZSCSI) and check power settings for your drives. Maybe the monitor failing to return was just a Win9X power saving glitch and the DMI pool settings changed at that point. >After a hard reboot, I got the ominous message after "Verifying DMI Pool >Data", "Boot disk failure, insert system disk and press enter". This >doesn't sound good. Upon another reboot, I see that the drive shows up >in the Adaptec BIOS scan but with no ID#. The Boot disk failure error message is standard if no boot disk is detected. If you put a non-bootable floppy in the floppy drive and try to boot, you will get this message. Of if the first hard drive does not have an active partition or if the active partition does not include the necessary boot files, you get this message. It does not necessarily mean you have a bad hard drive. Please take out that IDE drive while you try to trouble shoot these SCSI problems. (It will make things simpler.) When you take it out, you should see "Verifying DMI Pool Data" and then the boot disk error again. Check to see if you are still set to boot from SCSI ID 0 in the SCSI BIOS. Your SCSI adaptor is not identifying your SCSI drives the way you want. (Say you are set to boot from ID 0 but the drives are "1 and 2 and 3" or "1 and 1 and 2"...or "0 and 0 and 2" or "0 and 0 and 1" etc. Did you change the SCSI IDs after reading David's message? Did you change one but not the other...so that they are both 0 or both 1? Check the jumpers for SCSI ID on both Cheetahs. And check again! Look for missing or miss-set jumpers. By the way, if you have two drives set for 0 (or both 1), your Adaptec might see them in the BIOS scan due to SCAM. Try turning off SCAM in the Adaptec BIOS and see what happens. Did you lose one Cheetah in the BIOS scan? SCAM may not work all the time...or correctly. You want no ID jumper on the boot drive (all 4 pairs of ID pins open) and a jumper across the ID 0 pins on the second Cheetah and a jumper accross the ID 1 pins on the IBM. First look to see if your boot drive has a jumper present. If it does, it's not set for ID 0. Was the SCSI BIOS installed? (You are notified after SCSI BIOS scans the devices.) It should be installed, but if it wasn't you wouldn't see the hard drives in DOS...and hence in FDISK (unless you used FDISK from within the full Win9X GUI). Boot from floppy disk and see what disk DOS sees as drive 1. The other disks would be drives 2 and 3. But you might not see all three of them. Which is missing? Is it the one that contains the operating system? (Remember that the 2940UW calls the drives 0, 1, and 2 whereas FDISK calls the drives 1, 2, and 3.) The knowledge of which drive DOS thinks is drive C: may help. (Look at the files that are present on this disk.) >In the Adaptec set up, the drive won't verify, with >the message in Sense key 02h, which translates to "Not ready- The media is >not ready to format. Be sure that media is inserted in the drive and that >the media is spun up". I am unable to see the drive in Fdisk from a Win98 >boot disk. So I guess that means that the drive is kaput. I haven't >changed >anything, things were working before. Everything is properly plugged in, >terminated etc. Something is wrong with the way the 2940UW adaptor sees this drive. I assume that this problem drive is the drive that you want to boot from. >Could a failing even though new drive have been the possible cause of >earlier problems, like being forced to go to safe mode upon any kind of >software update? No. You had two other major problems before. (Cable length and passive termination.) You did something since those were fixed...maybe changing ID jumpers. >Is this a failed drive? >I reinstalled my old WD IDE that was still loaded with Windows to >access my >mail etc. I did have it removed until the failure above and had >changed the >BIOS accordingly. As a general rule, I would go into SCSI Select and set things so that only IDs 0, 1, and 2 are scanned at boot. (If your IBM drive is ID 2.) Also, set these IDs for Wide, Synchronous, and Send Unit Start Command ...and set all other IDs except 7 (that's 3 through 6 and 8 through 15) to the opposites of these three settings. Watch out for 7 since this is the SCSI controller itself. Set 7 for Wide and Synchronous enabled... and 40 MB/sec (that's 20 MHz). Disable "treat removable drive as fixed drive at boot" in SCSISelect and disable "boot if bootable CDROM detected"... just for general principles. Do you have the SCSI BIOS set for "more than 2 drives?" (There's a setting for that. Enable it. It may help in DOS or with Partition Magic someday.) Tell the SCSI BIOS to reset on errors. When you get a SCSI problem, you have to check and recheck and re-recheck all the settings and jumpers and terminations. Make sure your ribbon cable is tightly plugged into the problem drive. Of course you could fry a drive if you plug a cable into the wrong pins...or bend some pins so that they short. (I'd think that having pins bent would screw up the whole SCSI bus however...and cause problems with other devices...maybe fry the controller so it wouldn't even report in at boot.) But maybe the drive would still work after fixing the connection. So unplug the problem drive and look at the pins on the cable to see if any are bent. Then carefully plug the drive back in. Also, think about power. Make sure the power connector is tightly attached to the problem drive. (You might want to pull the power plug from the problem drive and plug it back in.) Try switching power connectors with a different drive. See if the problem shifts to the other drive. Check your spin up delays. If you have spin up delays set, you'll see drive 0 appear in the BIOS scan right away, then 10 seconds later drive 1 will start to spin up and then appear. Then after another 10 seconds, drive 2 will start to spin up and then appear. (Can you hear them spin up?) Could you hear drive 0 spin up when the machine was doing the POST memory test? This is an important question. Can you set drive activity LEDs for your drives? These are helpful for diagnostic reasons...but you need the LEDs and your Bay Coolers must have a place for the LEDs. It does trouble me that you apparently booted okay at first... and then the problem occurred overnight as the computer was running. Are you sure you didn't make any changes in between? Regards, Bill PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download visit our download web page at: http://nospin.com/pc/files.html