FW: Anyone seen this before?

Steve. I'm top-posting for brevity.
Your setup is a bit out of the box, but I'll take a stab at it.
Connecting non-hard drive devices to RAID adapters is something SCO never recommends. It's kind of a crap shoot.

Having said that, it looks like you've got a 50 pin SCSI-IDE bridge attached to a 68 pin controller, which would require some sort of adapter. Check termination AND terminator power carefully for both the 50pin and 68pin endpoints. Ideally your 68pin to 50pin adapter should be last on the cable and terminate the 68pin side, while the AEC-7720 terminator jumper is enabled for the 50pin side.

The Acard AEC 7720U doesn't support SCSI disconnect. When you tickle it with a command, it grabs the bus and doesn't let go until a timeout occurs.
I'm guessing when that happens, the hard drives may think they are "off the bus" and spin down.

You may want to try getting a cheap stand-alone SCSI adapter on Ebay just for attachement of the DVD-RAM drive. You may also try ensuring that the AEC-7720U is at firmware 6.88, which is the most current, but I'm not sure how much that will help.
We've had mixed results using the AEC-7722 model, but we've never tried it with a RAID adapter.

Tom Podnar
Microlite

------ Original Message ------
From: "Steve M. Fabac, Jr." <smfabac@xxxxxxx>
Date: Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 1:31 AM EST
To: distribution@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Anyone seen this before?

I have a client running SCO 5.0.5 Host on a Compaq Prosignia 740 system where I replaced the single hard disk on the cha controller with an Adaptec 2110S RAID controller and a pair of disks (RAID1).

The system has been running fine since the installation of the 2110S in August 2004.

Last week I talked the client into replacing his Cypher QIC tape drive and home brewed cpio backup with a DVD writer and Microlite BackupEdge 2.2.

I had some initial problem with getting Backup Edge to properly recognize the DVD drive. But working with Microlite tech support, we identified an SCO tech article TA105353 that addresses SCSI underrun errors with the Compaq cha driver. Once the changes specified in the article were applied to the SCSI ID assigned to the DVD (the IDE dvd drive is connected with an AEC 7720U SCSI to IDE adapter), Backup Edge was able to auto detect the drive and subsequently backup and verify using DVD-RAM media.

Now the problem: When testing the RE2 disaster recovery CD boot image, I noted that the RAID1 hard disks spin down between operations when booting and performing operations from the RE2 media.

Example: Going to the shell prompt and executing "mount /dev/hd0root /mnt"
results in the disks spinning up, root is mounted, and then the disks spin down.

Subsequently, issuing the command "umount /dev/hd0root" is slow to execute as the disks spin up, hd0root is unmounted, and then the disks spin down. When I exited RE2 (to reboot the machine), the RAID controller message "flushing: 0 1 2.... etc." which normally appears when haltsys or shutdown is executed from the live system, is delayed as the controller waits for the disks to spin back up.

I have never seen this before with Backup Edge RE2 media.

When I sent an inquiry to Microlite tech support, the response was:

I don’t think this is RecoverEDGE related to be honest. We have no
code to control the hard drive outside of configuring, mounting, and
writing to it.

It sounds like some type of BIOS setting. However, I will pass this
over to our engineers to see if they have an opinion.

But since SCO 5.0.5 is obsolete product and Microlite does not list it as supported with BE 2.2, I don't expect any further testing from Microlite.

I am posting this to the NG in the hope that someone had seen this before (disks spinning down) on the Adaptec 2110 controller when cdrom or emergency boot floppy has been booted and can direct me to the appropriate setting to change this behavior.

--
Steve Fabac
S.M. Fabac & Associates
816/765-1670



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