SCSI hard drives

kkcan · November 5th, 2004, 05:26 PM

I will be honest...I am not a hardware expert. Especially when it comes to SCSI drives.

Have a server that has 2 SCSI drives. One drive has Win 2000 Server installed the other has nothing. When I have both of them connected to the IDE cable and boot up.....it does not see the bootable drive. I unplugged the Win 2000 drive and just plugged in the blank drive. Went into the Adaptec Utilities and formatted the drive...there was nothing on it. Connected the IDE cables back up and rebooted....thinking that it would see the Win 2000 boot drive and come up. Same issue.

Do I need to see if the master/slave configuration is set correctly on the drives??

Not sure what to do...

sm8000 · November 5th, 2004, 06:04 PM

SCSI drives do not use IDE cables or Master/Slave jumpers. Go into the Adaptec card's BIOS and make sure it and the two drives all have unique ID numbers. Also make sure the bus is terminated.

Oh, and once you format a drive, of course there will be nothing on it. Formatting involves disk-wide erasure.

sechs · November 5th, 2004, 09:05 PM

Also make sure that the system drive is bootable in the BIOS. Generally, ID 0 is bootable by default.

Peter M · November 6th, 2004, 06:08 AM

You are connecting SCSI drives to IDE cables? Erm ... may I suggest you connect them to a SCSI cable instead? If they survived what you've been doing there, that is.

Chiguy · November 6th, 2004, 07:22 AM

You have to be sure that SCSI devices are terminated correctly also.

http://www.pctechguide.com/tutorials/SCSI1.htm

kkcan · November 6th, 2004, 10:54 AM

Again, like I said I am not a hardware person.

The SCSI drives are connect to SCSI cables. not IDE cables.

There are two drives. When the OS drive is the only one connected, the ID is 0 and it boots up with no problem. When both are connected it will not boot up.

Again....not sure what I am doing.

Does it matter how each are connect to the cable. When you look at the case the top drive is the non-bootable (but formatted drive) and the lower drive is the Win 2000 OS. When I go into the BIOS I only have the options to go into the Utilities and view/edit the configurations. When I have both connected and go into the view/edit it shows no devices on any of the ID#'s. Just not sure what to change. I do not want to mess anything up or screw up the drives.

I apologize for sounding so ignorant, but I am used to just formatting a drive and not having to configure anything on the SCSI bios.

Thanks for the tutorial ChiGuy....I will definetly research and study it.

sm8000 · November 6th, 2004, 11:39 AM

Disconnect the OS drive and see if the Adaptec BIOS will detect the empty drive, to make sure it's not dead. If it's alive, you need to sort your termination. If the empty drive is at the top of the case, are there any unused connectors after (above) it on the cable?

sechs · November 6th, 2004, 12:59 PM

Both of your drives have the same ID. Change the ID of the second drive.

zepper · November 6th, 2004, 01:35 PM

Go to the drive mfr's web site and download the installation guide for your drives. Set the Device ID of the second drive to 1 (usually you put a jumper on the first pair of Device Id pins. And make sure the Termination is disabled on the second drive.
. When you next boot up, the card should recognize both drives. Then you go into the adapter setup and set the device settings for your second drive per the drive's specifications.
. Go here for lots of good SCSI info and links: http://www.scsifaq.org .

Some good SCSI vendors:
hypermicro.com (may offer free ground shipping if you mention www.storagereview.com - check the SR site for the latest offer)
centrix-intl.com
pc-pitstop.com (offers PayPal as a payment option)
scsi4me.com (ditto)
and I can usually find good SCSI stuff for low bucks on eBay.

.bh.