ASCSI Adventure

[+dhe]

 

   I've been using a ASCSI card in my Geneve for years (decades?).

 

   Last time I tried to power on the Geneve - it locked up and wouldn't boot.

 

   I noticed the drive chain had fallen off - easy to do, since my ASCSI card didn't have twist in locks. Not sure if that's a feature of all of them or not.

 

   @InsaneMultitasker suggested I pull the drives off and hook them to a PC and see if they all came up.

 

    I contacted Chicken Systems - vendor for the SD2SCSI and asked how they tested SCSI devices and if they knew of a good USB 2 SCSI Controller.  The answer is, such a thing doesn't exist and they use an Adaptech AHA-2940.  So I sourced one of those on EBAY. Then I dug out of my pile of old computers a mid-2000 vintage computer with a PCI bus. Surprisingly, it still booted XP - but the CMOS battery was dead. I replaced that, installed the controller and was great ted with the familiar CTRL-A to enter SCSI utilities.

 

    Step 1, accomplished. My SCSI chain consisted of a ID 6 - an IOMEGA Zip-250, ID 5 - an IOMEGA Zip-100 and ID's 1 and 2 - a Quantum Fireball as emulated by the SD2SCSI. As I was picking up the Zip-100 the plastic windows fell in - apparently Zip drives are rapidly self destructing. That's OK - they where just backups anyway.

 

    Using my newly purchased HD-50 pin external to 25 pin SCSI cable - I hooked up the SD2SCSI - immediately both drives found.

 

    I took out my ASCSI, cleaned the edge conntectors, tested the fuse (good) and hunted around in my parts box for a couple of hours and found some tie downs for the 25 pin connector.

 

    I took the ASCSI and SD2SCSI and reinstalled, same problem.

 

    I think my next step is to try the ASCSI in a 4A and see what happens. Fortunately, everything on the ASCSI is in a socket, so I can pull out each chip and run it through the TL-866.

 

    Does anyone have the minimem incantation to page in the ASCSI DSR and read the first 16 bytes?

[+InsaneMultitasker]

6 hours ago, dhe said:

    I think my next step is to try the ASCSI in a 4A and see what happens. Fortunately, everything on the ASCSI is in a socket, so I can pull out each chip and run it through the TL-866.

This is advisable when you are not certain a card like the ASCSI is functional as troubleshooting with a TI console is much more forgiving.  Your Geneve lockup could be a symptom of a Geneve EPROM that requires an update (and locks up when a file is no found), a bad system or load file, a damaged ASCSI card, etc. Problem isolation is your friend. 

 

Edit:  Check for shorts between input/ground and output/ground at the regulator.  Also check regulator output with nothing else in the PEB, if you have a PEB extender card. 

 

The Mini Memory cartridge and most debugger software e.g. SBUG are handy for turning on a peripheral card and inspecting the >4000 RAM address space.  I usually start with MM because it doesn't require a disk peripheral or any cards besides the flex interface and the device you are trying to inspect.

 

Minimem steps <do not type the brackets below>

 

C1100 <enter>

<1> enter (turns on dsr)

<.>

M4000 <enter>  to view one byte at a time starting at 4000.

 

don't turn on more than one base CRU at a time. Turn off/on the console to reset, or redo the CRU operation with a <0>.

 

[+OLD CS1]

6 hours ago, dhe said:

such a thing doesn't exist

Technically, they do, but they are as rare as hens teeth and costly when you find them (upwards of $250,) and you will need a legacy machine (Windows XP) for the drivers.  I have been hunting them down for a while, but ultimately settled on a couple of Adaptec CardBus (PCMCIA) SCSI adapters.