[jca]

I just bought an Atlas III Ultra SCSI 18gb external hard drive from Transintl.com for my 8500 (NewerTech G3 Card upgraded).

I can't seem to get the drive to behave properly in the SCSI chain. No matter what ID I give the drive, it takes up all of the IDs on the bus and displays 7 copies of itself on the desktop. (Each being a 18gb size - I didn't partition the drive.) Tried FWB, Drive Setup, etc... I've tried having just the drive in the chain, with passive termination, active termanation (SCSI Sentury), different ID numbers, etc... But I can't seem to solve this problem. (It happens bother under OS 9 and 8.5.1).

Can anyone help?

[This message has been edited by jca (edited 06-13-2000).]

[Don Foy]

It sounds like the drive is not connected to the SCSI switch on the back of the unit and is set via jumper internally to ID0. I did that one time and got the same result (last week, inadvertantly). I'm assuming that the drive is new and under warranty, therefore you can't look inside and see.

So I would call the vendor and see what they say. See if you can get them to trade it out.

Someone else may have a better answer, but that's what it was for me last week.

Don

This typically happens when the SCSI ID of the drive matches the ID of the SCSI Host Bus Controller (typically factory-set to ID #7).

If the ID selector of the drive is *not* set to 7, you've either got a misconfigured cable inside the drive enclosure, or a defective drive controller-board that's ignoring the selector switch.

Don: Setting the drive to 0 shouldn't cause this problem; in the worst case, it would simply conflict with the internal HDD (which is also probably set to 0) and the machine would either not boot, not mount one of the drives, or corrupt the heck out of both drives' directories. If the drive is mounting at every ID, it's more likely an ID conflict with the SCSI controller.

I also ran into this problem after setting up an internal RAID in my 9600/350 and an Adaptec SCSI card, after I reset one of the drives from SCSI ID 0 to ID 2 the problem disappeared. I believe that I found out just this morning what the problem was.

It is possible to reset Adaptec's card ID, using the PowerDomain control panel. Typically the ID is set at 7, somehow the ID reset itself to 0 and was conflicting with the drive, just as rY. said.

Download scsi probe at <ftp://ftp.adaptec.digisle.net/mac/scsi/SCSIProbe_v512.hqx>, check your ID's, and change them if neccessary. If the drive is not responding to the change in ID's, contact the reseller or manufacturer of the drive as Don Foy suggested.

Cheers! Vlad

[jca]

Appreciate all the advice. I opened up the drive to see if the SCSI ID switch cable was loose and/or not connected. (It looked okay to me. I didn't see any other cable problems - didn't get too nosey, as I didn't want to void the warrenty.

Anyway, called TransIntl, and they're going to switch out the drive. The person I talked to seemed to agree that it was a SCSI problem (obviously) and that the drive was conflicting with the bus... He didn't say whether it was relative to SCSI ID 0 or 7, as posted here...

My next question is, if I wanted to change the SCSI ID of the internal Apple hard drive from 0, how would I do that?

Thanks for all the help/info!

[baliset]

Internal Hard drives are set to ID zero. To change this, you usually need to look at the jumper block settings on the circuit board of the drive itself. Preciseley where this is varies with the manufacturer.A usual configuration is 3 sets of pins, sometimes labeled A0, A1 and A2. With ID=0, none of these pins are "blocked". To change the ID, count in binary so, e.g, ID=3 means A0 and A1 blocked (that is A0=1 plus A1=2). Apart from this just remember the other rules of SCSI- each device needs a unique number, and that the internal end of the SCSI chain also needs termination (again, either a single jumper block is enabled for "Termination enable" (newer drives), or there are several multi-pinned resistor "packs" slotted in near the SCSI data cable on the circuit board (older drives). You must remember this if you are changing the physical *order* of the drives inside your Mac. e-mail me if this isn't clear.

------------------
Nathan Zamprogno,
Manager, Baliset Solutions
[email protected]

[Don Foy]

I stand corrected. What I had done was put jumpers on all three jumpers and had made it ID 7, just like rY. had said. Hey, at least I was right that it was a SCSI problem.