scsi failure??

[Red_Lion]

Hello,
I have been trying to help a friend of mine, with a ploblem relating to his PC.But My Knowledge of SCSI configs are limited.
He has an old Pc which he was given. It will not boot up correctly and has 3 HDD's which are all SCSI. He formatted all the drives and since then,has been unable to get access to CD-Rom and two of the 1Gb HDD's.
I have tried the win98 boot disk to give CD-rom support but this failed and hence my failure to load Win98.
The boot up screen displays the following messages...
Primary SCSI ID #0 - HP C37255
- Device connected but not ready
Primary SCSI ID #1 - IBM ....Drive C: (80h)
Primary SCSI ID #2 - IBM ....Drive D: (81h)
Primary SCSI ID #3 - Sony ...CD Rom :

This is what confuses me, as you can see that all drives and CD Rom has been detected but for one reason or another cannot be accessed.
Does the 80H and 81H indicate that there is some sort of Disk failure?
Will he need new scsi drivers?etc.
Any ideas most welcome.

[Axel]

I'm reasonably sure that the win98 boot floppy doesn't have what you need to init that SCSI card.

First, you have to load the SCSI card driver, typically within the config.sys file - make one on the boot floppy with the edit command if there isn't one already there. Also, you'll need to make sure the mscdex file is on the boot floppy
then, within the autoexec.bat file, you launch the mscdex command followed by a switch or two and the SCSI CD-ROM driver patch.

there is a really good write-up of this in the www.adaptec.com (http://www.adaptec.com) web page which helped me with an ASUS card and CD-ROM -
and I thought IDE CD-ROM's were fun....

By the looks of it, you appear to have an HP SCSI adapter there and it doesn't seem to be starting the drives when you power up.

You'll want to surf the HP web area to try to locate a driver for it, but then you might get lucky and a generic adaptec SCSI driver might work for you.

Next, the data_lifeguard tool kit on www.westerndigital.com (http://www.westerndigital.com) has generic SCSI adapter and HD diag tools in it's download area which might be of help to you.

Lastly, if this is old HP stuff you're dealing with, then you might try the seagate web page as they made most of the first HP hard drive components.

[BBA]

Did you change any SCSI ID numbers?

The device at ID 0 must be the boot device/drive. The SCSI controller is device 7.

If the "Primary SCSI ID #0 - HP C37255" is actually a hard drive, then it has a problem and you will need to remove it or change the id numbers to allow one of the other drives to be the boot drive.

AS FOR CDROM...

you need to load device drivers for the scsi devices in config.sys ...mine for example has these lines:


DEVICE=ASPI8XX.SYS
DEVICE=SYMCD.SYS /D:SYM001


And you need to load mscdex from autoexec.bat with a line like this:



a:\MSCDEX.EXE /D:SYM001



Note: The drivers I use are for symbios SCSI cards, yours may be different due to type of SCSI card used. You should go to the website of the SCSI controller manufacturer of your adapter to find the correct drivers.

[Banti]

Are the terminated jumpers set on any of these drives?

Banti

[Mntsnow]

What brand/model of SCSI card are you using?

Why was "device 0" not bolded like the others? does this mean it is working or not?

Make sure that BOTH ends of the scsi chain are terminated.......sounds like in your case the Card is one end and one of the drives is the last (ONLY the LAST drive on the cable should have termination)

Mntsnow