I wish to thank Sara Kunz, Graeme Hanson, and Bayard Felter for useful
suggestions in tracking down my Octane booting problems. I also wish to
thank Hank zamenski and Mark Peterson who initially helped me zero-in on the
scsi(0) related issues. I would like to give a summary of my findings.
Before this morning I was pretty upbeat, but now I am not so sure.
The first plan after I read these suggestions was to swap the internal disk
with an existing 9GB external disk, and then use hinv at the PROM level to
see either scsi(0) or scsi(1) disk was not seen occasionally. That would
seem definitively tell me whether it was a disk problem or scsi(0) problem.
That plan did not work because the scsi adaptors for the two disks are very
different. I would really have to get another disk from SGI to test it.
Unfortunately we do not have hardware contract with SGI. But I noticed that
there are 3 ID slots with scsi(0) inside. We only have one disk at ID1. So
we moved the disk to ID2 and setenv the OSLoadPartition and SystemPartion to
scsi(0)disk(2). The system boot up well under such arrangement. In the
last two days, I have brought it down repeatedly to the PROM level, hinv
never fails to recognize all disks, and the system always boot up smoothly.
If I moved the disk back to ID1, more than half of the time at PROM level,
hinv did not see the internal disk and would not boot.
I thought this was pretty definitive that ID1 adaptor has a bad pin. The
only thing worried me about ID2 position is that the internal disk sits in a
tray that is grounded at ID1 position but not at ID2. But this morning I
decided to boot into miniroot from CDROM and look around. I noticed SCSI
parity errors reported for scsi(0)disk(2) during the process. Even though
it has no problem booting and seems to work fine, there is something wrong
with it. And I still do not have definitive answer whether it was the disk
or the scsi controller until we get a SGI disk.
Hsin
--
Hsin Wang, Ph.D.
NMR Facility Manager
College of Staten Island
2800 Victory Boulevard
Staten Island, NY 10314
Phone: 718-982-3809
Fax: 718-982-3910
Email: wang_at_postbox.csi.cuny.edu
Received on Thu Dec 07 2000 - 15:28:22 MST