What Happened Here?

[bigbeark]

I recapped an ASUS CUR-DLS board earlier this year. This is a dual CPU P3 board, with onboard LSI SCSI running 2 866 CU-mine CPUs, running Mandriva Linux.After the recap, everything worked great, but two faults that were there before the recap, were not corrected by the recap.

The Onboard USB ports were still not working and only one of the onboard SCSI channels was detected and worked. I had put a D-Link USB 2-port card in, but it didn't work either. (Problem is NOT the settings in the BIOS). Still the board worked well. I put it away for a few months.

Got it out this week, pressed the start button, immediate shutdown. I'm thinking short so I removed the USB card. Now it starts up, but no video.

Take the board out of the case, test it on the table with PSU and monitor only. Finally pull out one CPU, replace it with a terminator. Now it boots and video works. Replace the bad CPU with a good one of same model#.

Put it back in the case, boots but gets kernel panic trying to load the operating system. Assume problem with onboard LSI SCSI. Put known
working Adaptec 29160 in, computer is working again, but Firefox is complaining of obsolete video player.

Decide to reload operating system. Won't load. Hangs forever. Some kind of
hard disk error. Swap the CD Drive for a known good one. Load into "Live"
(Linux) mode. Able to look at the contents of the hard drive, looks fine to me. Shut down, retry, still won't load OS.

PSU is the same Huntkey that worked before - 350W.

Going to try to load an operating system onto the offending drive using another machine.

Any debugging suggestions?

[pfrcom]

Re: What Happened Here?

You experienced SCSI termination problems in a previous thread

Are you sure your SCSI cables and termination are OK this time ?

I've had problems with SCSI devices being detected erratically - turned out to be the cable itself

Could not believe it - after all, a cable is as passive a component as you can get - just 68 lengths of wire with a plastic coating, and this one had no obvious physical damage

None the less, the problems just vanished when I used a different cable

And if you're using 80 pin SCA to 68 pin UW adapters, all bets are off

I'd suggest trying a cable with an Active terminator on the end of it, and setting all devices, except the motherboard connectors, to non-terminated

Some SCSI forums I've trawled in the past, suggest Granite Digital as the ultimate solution for connections

Problem with them is you're paying professional level money for professional level solutions

Maybe better for your sanity to stop focusing on SCSI, as I've done, and use consumer level components, performance of which is getting better every day

[stj]

Re: What Happened Here?

i'v seen lots of ribbon-cables fail, it's in the sockets, the piercing contacts get unreliable because of being pulled by the cable when people unplug the lead.

[kc8adu]

Re: What Happened Here?

lvd scsi cables are even more fragile than ide since they are not a solid ribbon.the wires are woven and in some cases not even overwrapped.tiny wires are delicate.scrapped a few of these cables back in the day when they were very expensive.

[ratdude747]

Re: What Happened Here?

all the ones i have seen are woven and then coated in clear plastic. i think i have one with a built in terminator.