second half of day

[kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker)]

Well, I didn't get in to work at 10:00.  I didn't get in to work until
past 13:00.  I was reading Usenet.

The disk we were using inside the Eagle van at Nellis -- not the motor
home, but the other one -- the disk that goes with our hot-shit
Intergraph -- seems to not work correctly.  I hooked it up to the
Intergraph; no boot.  (The machine doesn't see the disk during the
boot-time SCSI scan and tries to boot off the net.)  I hooked it up to
my machine; hang during boot-time SCSI-bus scan.  (Disk is LVD;
controller card in my machine is SE.)

Took the disk out and stuck the four classified disks in.  Try to boot
the Intergraph (obviously I can't try this with my own machine, because
that machine is hooked up to the Internet!)  No boot.  Doesn't see
'em.

So the disk is probably OK; either the cabinet, the LVD SCSI controller
in the Intergraph, both LVD cables, the terminator, or all five disks
are bad.  I'm going to try to connect the disk directly (without the
cabinet) tomorrow.

Sigh.  I go to marital counseling with Marilyn at 16:30, then out to
dinner with her, then return to work around 20:45.  I return.

OK, so much for that.  How about the 8mm tape drive, which Doug decided
to pack in polyethylene bubble wrap in a small box while at the post
office without me?  It's single-ended, even if it is Wide.  I hook it
up to the narrow SCSI port on the back of my machine with a 50<->68-pin
SCSI cable.  Machine hangs during boot-time SCSI scan.  Tape drive
appeared to power on correctly, though; pushing the cute little eject
button ejects the tape, and inserting a tape makes it do the annoying
back-and-forth-scan thing 8mm drives like to do when you insert a tape
into them.  All the LEDs appear to work.  

Check SCSI id.  It's 4; that doesn't conflict with anything else on the
bus.  (I have my boot disk, a Zip disk, and a CD-ROM on there.)  The
system sees it during boot-time SCSI scanning; it just refuses to boot
further.

Hmm, possibly the thing to do is to see if the SCSI cable is bad.

The ATAPI drive we bought while we were out there I have installed in
my machine as the only drive on the secondary IDE controller.  (In
fact, it's the only drive on either IDE controller.)  Windows NT can
tell there's another drive there; Disk Administrator wants to write a
signature on it, but apparently fails to do so; it keeps wanting to do
it every time I run it.  It thinks there's a "Disk 1", but displays
nothing for it.

Linux fdisk gets ENODEV on all of /dev/hd[abcd].

OK, time to reboot into Linux again and watch it scan the disks; maybe
I need to add IDE support to my kernel or something.

This is the kind of shit I meant when I was talking about
self-diagnosing hardware.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Thu Sep 09 1999
60 days until the Internet stock bubble bursts on Monday, 1999-11-08.
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>