Hardware flakiness (Windoze BSOD)

Yep, any true SCSI fan has a big box of cables and adapters for every possible combination! Someday I'll toss 'em...

Corrupted data including an invalid length, causing overwriting of the buffers. First step is terminat the scanner, terminators should be easy to find and probably free if you ask nicely. Try a local computer repair shop that has been in business for over 10 years, likely they have abox of 'em and don't know what to do with it. Pay shipping and I'll send you one. Without termination (and probably without a good cable) it will continue to be spastic...

On 11/4/2009 5:38 AM PeterD spake thus:

I was hoping to be able to find one at my favorite recycled-goods store (Urban Ore in Berkeley), which has a *ton* of all kinds of cables, kind of a snake pit all tossed together. I sorted through it and *almost* found what I needed (50-pin high-density to 25-pin D), but no go. I was surprised, as there are so many oddball cables in there.

I'm not sweating it. I just unplug the damn scanner when I'm not using it. That's the $0 solution here.

Everything from the venerable Mac II to Blue & White G3s (well, not

And then... Didn't change anything except to install OS X 10.3 on the Blue & White, and the SCSI chain just vanished -- the Mac couldn't find it at all. Stuck a terminator on the far end, and it all worked again.

Granted, my experience is with Macs, but in that context, in nearly 20 years, I never found SCSI to be very mysterious or tempermental, much less felt the need to go looking for a goat...

Isaac

Hi!

Twenty five pin SCSI cabling is, ah, not the most desireable thing to have. It's a Macintosh thing and thankfully not very common elsewhere.

You can often get away with some truly impressive stuff on lower speed SCSI setups. I've seen an IBM PS/2 Model 65 that came to me with termination enabled on both hard drives and it *worked* when I got it. I suspect it worked for many years, as it was a Netware server well into the late 90s and quite possibly the early 2000s.

I cleaned the large amount of dust out and it stopped working with SCSI related errors at POST. Fixing the double termination solved it. The errors were baffling until I examined the drives and said "there is no way that can be right".

But if you can, don't use a hacked up, homemade SCSI cable. Cables exist to do what you want and they can still even be found. Price might be an issue, but if you can wait and shop around...it will be less of one.

The following old discussion (short link)

"SCSI is *NOT* magic. There are *fundamental technical reasons* why it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then."

I've never noticed a particularly serious problem with either. But then again, I've always run brand name equipment from Adaptec, BusLogic, LSI Logic, IBM and Mylex. The few times I've run into less well known SCSI adapters, I have found something that was troublesome.

Well, CD burning was an adventure, but I think it had more to do with what hardware revision of a given IBM MCA SCSI adapter was expected by the Windows NT driver.

Some reason why you're not using the latest service pack and post SP4 rollup? You probably should be, unless some situation with software precludes your doing so.

I guess I'd question how good of a clone it really is. After you fix the cable, that is. The nature of the card (as you describe it) sounds very odd to me.

Is termination set properly? Don't rely on autotermination to get it right--set it yourself! The devices at each end of the SCSI chain should be terminated. In most cases, the SCSI adapter is electrically in the middle of the internal and external buses. So, you'd terminate the last device on the internal cable and the scanner, leaving the host adapter unterminated.

William

Hi!

Set it manually if you can. With a mix of internal and external devices, the adapter should *not* be terminating in most cases.

Heh. :-)

When SCSI screws up, it *really* screws up. Some host adapters take it better than do others, but I guarantee you that it is possible to knock over almost any SCSI setup when certain things happen.

William