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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!news.dfn.de!RRZ.Uni-Koeln.DE!zpr.uni-koeln.de!se From: se@ZPR.Uni-Koeln.DE (Stefan Esser) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: NCR810 SCSI help needed! Date: 8 Jan 1996 01:22:26 GMT Organization: Institute for Mathematics, University of Cologne, Germany Lines: 120 Sender: se@Sysiphos (Stefan Esser) Message-ID: <4cprki$aj3@news.rrz.uni-koeln.de> References: <4cnmn0$dk8@access4.digex.net> <4cpl1q$5am@access4.digex.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: sysiphos.mi.uni-koeln.de To: dcmyers@access4.digex.net (David Myers) Bcc: se,jkh@freebsd.org In article <4cpl1q$5am@access4.digex.net>, dcmyers@access4.digex.net (David Myers) writes: |> Just to follow up my own article...I found another PC and used the makeflp.bat |> to create a boot floppy, to see if FreeBSD's drivers could make sense of |> the card where DOS' couldn't. Here's a transcript (and note that my 1 gig |> disk is SCSI 0; my CDROM is SCSI 4): |> |> |> ncr0 <ncr53c810 scsi> rev 1 int a irq ?? on pci0:6 |> int line register not set by BIOS The "irq ??" message indicates that no IRQ has been assigned to this PCI slot. Please use the PCI BIOS to assign an otherwise unused IRQ ... |> ncr0 waiting for device to settle |> (ncr0:0:0): "QUANTUM FIREBALL1080S 1Q09" type 0 fixed SCSI 2 |> sd0 (ncr0:0:0): Direct-Access |> sd0 (ncr0:0:0) Fast SCSI 2 100ns (10Mb/sec) offset 8 |> 1042 MB (2134305 512-byte sectors) Looks fine! The NCR chip is working (without interrupt it will poll the NCR. This does not only severely limit the maximum performance, but will also make the final unmount at shutdown fail, and thus you can't cleanly unmount your partitions). |> ncr0:4 Error (80:41) (4f-6f-0) (0/13)@(6c4:0f000000) |> script cmd = 6a3400000 |> reg: da 10 80 13 47 00 04 1f 00 0b 0f ae 80 00 06 00 Well, this doesn't look that good ... dstat=80: DEF (data fifo empty, OK) sist =41: CMP+PAR (arbitration complete + scsi parity error) SCR_MOVE_ABS (1) ^ SCR_MSG_IN, <== failed NCR instruction NADDR (msgin[0]), SCR_TO_REG (scratcha), <== next cmd = 6a340000 0, Ok. This is very simple, but I'm not actually sure what to do about it ... The drive sent it's first SCSI MESSAGE to the NCR, and there was a parity error. It is a bad habit of cheap SCSI CDROM drives to lack support of SCSI parity. They were most often driven by cheap and slow dedicated host adapters, that spole just enough SCSI to support such a single CDROM drive. It is plain silly to use a FAST SCSI bus without parity, and I'm not sure that there is much use in having the NCR driver support such a device. SCSI-2 demands support of parity, BTW. |> So something about my CDROM at address 4 is causing problems. Right now, |> it's in an external case with an active terminator . That "irq ??" thing |> bothers me as well, but there's no apparent way to set the IRQ on the SCSI |> controller. There's an unidentified jumper 6 on the SCSI card, but no |> other user-settable jumpers. The IRQ is assigned in the PCI BIOS, not on the NCR card. PCI bus cards are "plug'n'play", but because of the screwed up design of the IBM PC and the requirement of backwards compatibility (to make a PCI card emulate an ISA card), tjis is not really true for PC compatible PCI systems. |> There are a bunch of additional error messages that follow this, each one |> relating to an apparent failure of device 4. So, I decided to try booting |> from the floppy with the CD powered down. When I do that, the boot |> continues with the following messages: |> |> vga0 rev 0 int a irq 12 on pci0:19 |> rootfs is 1000Kbyte compiled in MFS |> |> |> ...and then it freezes completely. Well, you could just swap the VGA and NCR cards, since there seems to be a suitable IRQ assigned to the VGA card's current slot ... |> So the good news is that the card is recognized, the bad news is that I |> can't install until the CD-ROM comes on-line. Well, and the CDROM won't come online as long as the NCR checks SCSI parity. |> Can anyone make sense of these symptoms? Feel like I'm getting close... Well, please swap the VGA and NCR cards, or assign an IRQ to the NCR in the PCI BIOS (the VGA card does not need any interrupt, so select NA instead of 12 for it). Then try booting from floppy again, and enter "-v" at the "Boot: " prompt. This will enable verbose boot messages, and you may get some extra information to understand why the system doesn't complete the boot procedure. If you want to install from that CDROM drive, then you will need some other controller that deals with non- parity drives. Maybe the Adpatec 1542 or 1522 do, I have never tried this myself. The older the SCSI card, the more likely that it will accept your CDROM. You will be able to rebuild your kernel with no SCSI parity later, so you won't need that other SCSI card anymore after you installed kernel sources (perhaps you know somebody who will let you use his SCSI card for the installation). Send mail when you have things set up and need further instructions ... Regards, STefan -- Stefan Esser, Zentrum fuer Paralleles Rechnen Tel: +49 221 4706021 Universitaet zu Koeln, Weyertal 80, 50931 Koeln FAX: +49 221 4705160 ============================================================================== http://www.zpr.uni-koeln.de/~se <se@ZPR.Uni-Koeln.DE>