SCSI hardware issues

[John Reynolds]

Got up this morning, system had apparently reboot (probably power tripping). So I click on my profile icon, system takes forever to load my desktop. I get an error message about services.exe encountering an error (# 1073741818), and it reboots my system after 60 seconds (nothing suspicious like blaster running in processes). It reboots, comes up and says no boot drive found. Reboot, same thing. Reboot again, boots into XP just fine. I defrag the C: drive, finishes fine. Leave for work. Come up, machine is at my desktop but hard locked. Reboot, SCSI controller doesn't see either of the two hard drives, and in fact hangs at SCSI ID 0. Reseated the LVD cable that connects the two drives, machine then boots fine and I'm making this post.

Not sure how all of the above can be attributed to a lose cable, though. Any thoughts/suggestions?

 

[Tim Murray]

You act as though there are times when SCSI hardware does not have issues.

Seriously, though, it sounds like the controller is dying rather than the drive or a cable. Of course, it could be a dying cable, but that makes a lot less sense.

 

[Dio]

I gave up on SCSI a long time ago. Too many 'It worked yesterday, what the f***ing hell is wrong with it today?' problems. Once I finally got the system stable I was terrified to open the box (and it turned out I was right to; the next time I did it went unstable again).

At least with SCSI even if the data transfer goes wrong it shouldn't corrupt the drive as the protocol is at least decently error checked.

One thing I would suggest: on a dicky machine, defragging is not a good plan. I had one machine here which had a couple of minor memory errors I didn't know about (I just could see it wasn't quite stable) - if I'd defragged the hard drive, then those minor errors would have got liberally distributed into every file on the disk, which is Bad.

 

[StefanS]

Got up this morning, system had apparently reboot (probably power tripping). So I click on my profile icon, system takes forever to load my desktop. I get an error message about services.exe encountering an error (# 1073741818), and it reboots my system after 60 seconds (nothing suspicious like blaster running in processes). It reboots, comes up and says no boot drive found. Reboot, same thing. Reboot again, boots into XP just fine. I defrag the C: drive, finishes fine. Leave for work. Come up, machine is at my desktop but hard locked. Reboot, SCSI controller doesn't see either of the two hard drives, and in fact hangs at SCSI ID 0. Reseated the LVD cable that connects the two drives, machine then boots fine and I'm making this post.

Not sure how all of the above can be attributed to a lose cable, though. Any thoughts/suggestions?

It sounds like your controller is passing away. When they're about to die you usually have situations where everything works just fine, then nothing works and so on. Try to mount your drive to another controller, if avaiable to check it...

 

[John Reynolds]

I gave up on SCSI a long time ago. Too many 'It worked yesterday, what the f***ing hell is wrong with it today?' problems. Once I finally got the system stable I was terrified to open the box (and it turned out I was right to; the next time I did it went unstable again).

At least with SCSI even if the data transfer goes wrong it shouldn't corrupt the drive as the protocol is at least decently error checked.

One thing I would suggest: on a dicky machine, defragging is not a good plan. I had one machine here which had a couple of minor memory errors I didn't know about (I just could see it wasn't quite stable) - if I'd defragged the hard drive, then those minor errors would have got liberally distributed into every file on the disk, which is Bad.

This is the first time I've ever had anything any problems with SCSI hardware in the past seven years of using it. That said, I'd backed up all my data recently and when I defragged I wanted to see if it would handle it (wasn't sure if it was the hard drive or what).

Anyways, since reseating that cable the system's been up 'n running for 16 hours now. Of course when no one hears from me tonight I'll regret making this post.

 

[epicstruggle]

JR, Im assuming your using scsi at home. So, exactly why go scsi, do you do anything HD intesive that you need to go this route? Just wondering.

In other news, have you heard of the serial attached scsi? http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20031110S0039 Sounds like this will spark new life into scsi.

later,
epic

 

[John Reynolds]

JR, Im assuming your using scsi at home. So, exactly why go scsi, do you do anything HD intesive that you need to go this route? Just wondering.

In other news, have you heard of the serial attached scsi? http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20031110S0039 Sounds like this will spark new life into scsi.

later,
epic

Mainly because years ago SCSI hard drives were so much faster than IDE drives. I've seriously thought about selling all my SCSI equipment during the next upgrade and getting a WD Raptor HD, a DVD drive, etc.

 

[StefanS]

I gave up on SCSI a long time ago. Too many 'It worked yesterday, what the f***ing hell is wrong with it today?' problems. Once I finally got the system stable I was terrified to open the box (and it turned out I was right to; the next time I did it went unstable again).

At least with SCSI even if the data transfer goes wrong it shouldn't corrupt the drive as the protocol is at least decently error checked.

One thing I would suggest: on a dicky machine, defragging is not a good plan. I had one machine here which had a couple of minor memory errors I didn't know about (I just could see it wasn't quite stable) - if I'd defragged the hard drive, then those minor errors would have got liberally distributed into every file on the disk, which is Bad.

This is the first time I've ever had anything any problems with SCSI hardware in the past seven years of using it. That said, I'd backed up all my data recently and when I defragged I wanted to see if it would handle it (wasn't sure if it was the hard drive or what).

Anyways, since reseating that cable the system's been up 'n running for 16 hours now. Of course when no one hears from me tonight I'll regret making this post.

My controller took 1 year before he finally died. There were some erratic misfunctions, that slowly increased until it happened on a day to day basis. ..