System hangs with LVD SCSI high speed drives

[arminroesch]

Actually I am using a ASUS board with onboard SCSI controller and 1IDE Disk and 3SCSI disks. The SCSI disks are LVD from IBM. Systems runs win98SE and all disk formated with partionmagic4.0. The controller has 3 SCSI buses; A) Fast for CDRs, B) Ultra, and C)LVD as the fastest.

From time to time the systems hangs and I only can press RESET to continue! The HD lamps stays on! This mainly happens during calculation of the CUE file for CD burner and during normalizing within MicroEditor. I checked all the wiring of the SCSI-bus and correct termination. All looks good.

My idea: The LVD bus is too fast for the hardware how it is realised. As a next step I will wire the disks to the slower bus Ultra.
Does somebody had similar experiences and what did you do?
Best regards,

[MTUSUPPORT]

Armin,
This problem occurs when you use the Fat 32 that comes with any of the Microsoft products.

We ship all of our systems using Fat32, but only from the program Partiotion Magic. This is the only way that we know, the Fat32 will work with Microeditor and MicroCD.

Thanks,

[arminroesch]

Dear Bryan,

Thank you for reply. I have formatted with FAT32 all disks with partion magic 4.0. First I was using Microsoft FAT32 but this definitvly does NOT work. Did you use Ultra2 SCSI disks too? They say up 80MB/s! Is there another possible bug?
With kind regards, Armin Rösch

[admin]

We discovered that the computer/drive was unreliable with a UDMA/100 drive attached to the 100MHz drive bus on an ASUS motherboard. It appears to be a problem between the motherboard and the hard drive, when run at 100MHz.

We moved the drive to the slower 33/66MHz bus and everything worked fine. This appears to be an "evolutionary" problem as the new UDMA/100 busses are being added to motherboards. The first ones to use it are the pioneers, and in this case it is on the "bleeding edge" of technology; i.e. not quite there yet.

Did you try moving your SCSI drive to the Ultra bus? I don't even know if this can be done. The goal is to slow down the drive and see if the problem goes away. Let us know if you have tried this.

[arminroesch]

Dear Bryan,

Thank you for the information that with UDMA100 was similar problems. Yes I can wire the disks to the slower bus. They are able to work in both modes. To work as LVD all have to the same then it works. During startup when the adapter searches for the devices you can see how they where recognized. As next step I will wire the disks to the other bus. First I have to finish different jobs. I will let you now about success.
Best regards

Armin

[clawson]

We have been having this identical problem (it seems) with our oldest MTU system here at WETA. I'm still in the process of troubleshooting it but, so far, I've been unable to eliminate the hang-up entirely. If I am able to resolve the situation satisfactorily, I will post a follow-up here.

Chas.

--
Charles Lawson
WETA Radio & Television
Washington, DC

[clawson]

Our venerable first MTU system now seems to be working wonderfully after replacing the SCSI controller AND modifying a couple of its defaults. By stepping down the transfer rates to about half the maximum value and turning off all caching options related to the SCSI card, we no longer see any lockups during any operations that we have tried. (This machine used to lockup during simple playback, recording, segment normalization, EFX, combining groups...&c. &c.) To any others who might be experiencing these problems while using new SCSI drives or controllers, I highly recommend taking the same steps if your motherboard is of an older generation.

Bryan was terrific in helping me track this down in spite of it not being MTU's fault. (I didn't realize until some time had passed that certain modifications had been made to the machine without my or MTU's knowledge.) I'm sorry for wasting any of your time, MTU folks, but we're cookin' once again.

Thanks!

Chas.

--
Charles Lawson
WETA Radio & Television
Washington, DC

[arminroesch]

Thank you for all the good ideas! I tried to wire the disks to SE (singleended) and connected them to the slower FAST bus.
The hang problem remains.
I tried to heavely reduce the speed on the onboard aha2940 controller.
The hang problem remains.
My idea is that the onboard solution ist not the best! I think I have to live for the monent with this hanging effect until I change the main board. Here I will choose a exterenal scsi adapter.
Best regards
Armin Rösch

[JTatum]

Which ASUS motherboard are you using? What model of SCSI drives do you have? Are you using any other SCSI devices? All of these things would have bearing on any answers I could provide.

I have built 7 different MTU based work stations in the last several years using various motherboards and have always been able to resolve the hardware issues. My current configuration consists of a SuperMicro S2DL3 Motherboard with Dual Pentium III Xeon 700 processors. It is running Windows NT on a SCSI drive running from the on board SCSI controller. The second segment of the on board SCSI controller is used to control the Yamaha 4216S CD/RW drive. I have also added an adaptec 3200 S RAID controller and configured 8 72 GB 15000 RPM LVD Ultra 160 SCSI drives in a RAID 0/1 Array. A 3com 3c905c TX completes the system.

If you will provide me with your hardware specs, I will advise you as best I can. I would also recommend that you switch to Windows NT 4.0 Workstation as it is significantly more stable than Windows 98. Note: I do NOT recommend Windows ME or Windows 2000 as both of these products require more hardware and come with a new set of problems. In general, stay away from MS upgrades until the release of SP1 for the 9x OS family or at least SP3 for the NT OS family. (OK, I was a SysAdmin in my former life.)

[arminroesch]

Dear John thanks for the inputs.

ASUS board Type P2B-S
on fast SCSI bus hpC1533A DAT tape drive
Yamaha CRW6416S writer

on the LVD bus

on #0 IBM DNES 318350W
on #1 IBM DNES 318350W
on #2 IBM DDYS T36950N

on the IDE bus a 15GB drive which is

C: partition 4GB
D: partition 11GB

all drives with partion magic 4.0 FAT32 system
and a standard CDROM 44X on the IDEbus

Armin

[JTatum]

OK,

The motherboard is a very good one. I have used it myself, no problems. The rest of the hardware looks compatible except perhaps the SCSI hard drives. While I can't be sure, it would appear that 2 of them, IBM DNES 318350W, are wide SCSI. The other one, IBM DDYS T36950N, is narrow. Typically SCSI hard drive manufacturers use the last letters of the drive model number to denote the drive type. You should be using drives that end in LVD. Further, I would bet that if you remove the IBM DDYS T36950N from the bus that the hangup problems would cease.

Give me the model and serial numbers for the SCSI drives and I will look into it further. In the meantime, try removing the IBM DDYS T36950N from the SCSI chain and reterminate if necessary. See if that doesn't fix your problem.

[JTatum]

OK,

More info. The SCSI controller on your motherboard should be an Ultra 2 LVD. Further research into the hard drives leads me to believe (if I'm reading the IBM model charts correctly) that you have the following installed in your machine.

#0 IBM Ultrastar 18ES
#1 IBM Ultrastar 18ES
#2 IBM Ultrastar 36LZX

Please confirm if this information is correct. Please note that if it is, you have two different drive types on the same bus. The 18ES is an Ultra2 LVD SCSI like your onboard controller and the 36LZX is an Ultra 160 LVD SCSI. I have conversed with a couple of friends on this topic and they also believe that this is what is causing your problem.

Providing my model information is correct, the recommendation is as follows:

Try removing the 36LZX from the SCSI chain to see if this corrects the problem. If it does, add an Ultra 160 SCSI card to your machine and run the new drive off of that. This will have the added benefit of increasing your throughput. BTW, the Adaptec 29160 works real well. Just be sure to disable the SCSI BIOS as you are not using it as a boot drive.

[arminroesch]

Thank you John for the inputs.

You are correct with the disks.
If I read the manual correct they are able for multimode. If only one on the chain is set to SE (single ended) all are that way.
They have a jumper to activate the termination and from their on all are working SE. I tried this once but the hanging problems remains. This brings me to the idea that the onboard controller has a problem.

The onboard controller has 3SCSI's
a. Fast scsi
b. Ultra
c. Ultra2w here are the 3 disks connected with a active termination at the end of the bus.

BTW I had the same problem BEFORE adding the 36GB disk!

But I think it may be a good choice to try a external SCSI controller.

Only for the LVD disks? or all?

Regards Armin

[JTatum]

Question, are you running these forced to SE?

[arminroesch]

Dear John,
Thanks for reply.

NO they are not forced to SE at the moment.
At booting the SCSI adapter shows them as ULTRA2 LVD disks with their typ number

Once I forced them to SE, and then they where indicated as FAST SCSI disks.
Unfortunately the hanging problem was still present.

This brought me to the idea that the onboard controller has somewhere a problem

Regards
Armin

[arminroesch]

In the meantime I had the same problem from time to time.
In the last few days it become more and more hard even to copy some files from one disc!

The disk on SCSI #1 IBM DNES 318350W hangs very often!

I moved that disk to another PC to verify. The hanging remains.
I have access to it and it is possible to move files but suddenly the disk produces a acoustical small click and the SCSI-bus is blocked.

If I only press RESET on the PC then it starts but the SCSI controller does not "see" the disk given above.
After a POWER OFF/ON the disk is back.

It seems to me that all the problems I had in the past was "produced" by a fault in that disk.

But do you expect such a fault in a new disk?

I am now working with another one.

Regards Armin