Other Old Adaptec HBA question

P

pjk

I have an old server that is on the verge of being retired. Very old. :-D FreeBSD 4.9

It has an Adaptec AHA-2940UW card. Today I cleaned it out and removed the DAT tape drive that was connected to the narrow bus (50 pin cable) but had never really been used.

The main HDD is running on the wide bus. (68-pin cable)

After I restarted it everything was fine except it constantly complains:

"ahc0: Someone reset channel A"

Then it does a dump that starts off like this (the console is frozen while this is happening):

========
(da0:ahc0:0:0:0): SCB 0x2e - timed out
>>>>>> Dump Card State Begins<<<<<<<
ahc0: Dumping Card State while idle, at SEQADDR 0x18
Card was paused

[... bla bla bla]

Ends like this:

(da0:ahc0:0:0:0): SCB 46: Immediate reset. Flags = 0x460
(da0:ahc0:0:0:0): no longer in timeout, status = 34b
ahc0: Issued Channel A Bus Reset. 38 SCBs aborted
========

I can't figure out what is happening here. Is there some kind of static configuration somewhere that is now mismatched because that tape drive was disconnected?

I used the Adaptec BIOS [CTRL-A] to try setting all the unused SCSI IDs to not get scanned during boot, but didn't help. I don't see any way from there to disable a channel or ID.

Stumped.
 
Crivens said:
Did you terminate the bus after removing the drive?
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply.

I just removed the cable from the HBA. That's the traditional 50-pin ribbon. The HDD is attached on a separate cable to the 68-pin wide bus.

I thought it only had to be terminated if there was a cable attached? It's been a while since I've worked with that interface.

Looking through the system messages, this only seems to occur on startup.

I saw these lines in dmesg - I assume they reflect the kernel config:

========
config> di aic0
config> di aha0
config> q
========


I looked at the custom kernel config I setup for this device years ago. (/src/sys/i386/conf/[HOSTNAME])

These seem to be relevant lines, I guess they are present in the generic kernel config too:

========
device ahc #AHA2940 and onboard AIC7xxx devices

device aha0 at isa?
device aic0 at isa?

(I commented out all the other SCSI and RAID driver lines)


#SCSI peripherals
device scbus #SCSI bus (required)
device da #Direct Access (disks)
device sa #Sequential Access (tape etc)
device cd #CD
device pass #Passthrough device (direct SCSI access)

========


There's nothing in rc.conf that specifies anything for the Adaptec devices.
 
It became too much of a problem, I had to reinstall the tape drive.

Still wish I could figure out why just pulling the 50-pin cable out of the HBA caused that problem, especially if there's no way to disable that interface.
 
pjk said:
It became too much of a problem, I had to reinstall the tape drive.

Still wish I could figure out why just pulling the 50-pin cable out of the HBA caused that problem, especially if there's no way to disable that interface.
Click to expand...
It' been 20 years since I've touched one but I'm pretty sure the Adaptec line of UW SCSI adapters had settings inside the BIOS that enabled your to select how the adapter terminated the SCSI bus. IIRC there was AUTO (i.e. auto sensing) and a couple other settings.

Try the following: configure the adapter to turn on termination of the entire bus (narrow and UW).
 
Ferrari-Dude said:
It' been 20 years since I've touched one but I'm pretty sure the Adaptec line of UW SCSI adapters had settings inside the BIOS that enabled your to select how the adapter terminated the SCSI bus. IIRC there was AUTO (i.e. auto sensing) and a couple other settings.

Try the following: configure the adapter to turn on termination of the entire bus (narrow and UW).
Click to expand...

Thanks for your suggestion.

I looked through the on-card BIOS settings extensively (CTRL-A at boot) and never found such an option.

I'll try to remember to check again when I have time to take it offline again.

IIRC some system BIOS' have SCSI-adapter related settings too but since this is an external card I'd be doubtful of that.

FWIW it's an ASUS P2L97 board. Been running nearly continuously 24x7 for almost 24 years, most of that on the same Quantum Atlas V 9GB drive. :-D
 
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