Date   : Sat, 05 Jan 2008 21:21:28 -0000
From   : bbcmailinglist@... (Ian Wolstenholme)
Subject: Technomatic Disaster

I've established that it's the host adapter which is faulty.  The Technomatic
drive and Adaptec board work fine when connected up to another host
adapter.

Is there any way I can test the host adapter further?  All the ICs are
registering 5V, some of the resistors are and some of them aren't, that
might be something to do with it.  There's no obvious damage to the
board and nothing happened that I know of to cause it to fail suddenly.

Best wishes,



Ian

----- Original Message -----
From: Jules Richardson [mailto:julesrichardsonuk@...]
To: bbc-micro@...
Sent: Mon, 31 Dec 2007 11:37:35 -0600
Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] Technomatic Disaster

Rob wrote:
> If ADFS isn't even seeing that there is a hard disc there (and mounts
> floppy as drive 0)  then it implies that it's something earlier in the
> chain than the disc itself.  I'd suggest swapping out the adaptec &
> host adapter boards with a known working system... 

Definitely - I've seen a few of those Adaptec boards fail now, and of course 
ST506/412 type drives aren't particularly reliable.

I'd start with a known-good drive first, or at least test that the drive being 
used is coming ready (either check the signal on the drive connector itself, 
or issue a 'test unit ready' command via the Adaptec board).

> There ought to be a way of interrogating the adaptec card to see if
> it's working, but not sure of the exact method; there ought to be some
> diag programs about though, I would imagine.

I think there is a diagnostic command built into the board - but unfortunately 
all it does is dump the system state over the SCSI bus to the host; I don't 
think the knowledge of how to interpret the data is in the public domain :-(

cheers

Jules


_______________________________________________
bbc-micro mailing list
bbc-micro@...
http://lists.cloud9.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/bbc-micro