Re: [Sheflug] Cover opened... WOW! What's that?:-) (was: he-he...can't open)computer's cover...

[Richard Stevenson <nospam [at] team.xtra.co.nz>]

On Wed, 9 May 2001, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:

> Thanks to all. The lock turned out to be unlocked, just opening the cover
> was a bit tricky... Now, some (or all) of you will laugh here - good!:-) I
> opened it - it's SCSI!... Well, I've never seen SCSI PCs before (and no
> SCSI comp. inside anyway), and I never had to deal with SCSI-specific
> things, so, forgive me my ignorance please... I know you can have PCI with
> a (plugged-in) SCSI-controller. But when you have both SCSI and PCI inside
> - does it mean the main bus is PCI with a built-in SCSI-controller (as it
> appears from lspci), or do they co-exist in a different way?

That's the most likely explanation, much like you get PCs with built-in
IDE controllers.  They just sit on the system bus and transfer data
between the disks and the rest of the system.  Dell make some nice
rackable server units with built-in SCSI :)  At the other end of the
scale, I believe Compaq sell Alphas with IDE now - just for the CD-ROM
drive (probably so they can ship a "slow" CD-ROM without it impacting on
disk performance for the rest of the system).

> The HD is
> SCSI too (1G)... It has 1 IDE port. So, I wanted to connect an IDE-CDROM
> from my (borrowed) another PC and install Debian (2.2r0)... I can't get
> CDROM recognized... Do I have to use ide-scsi? (don't think so - just a
> wild guess...)

It may have the IDE port disabled in the system BIOS, so you should check
that.  Also, if there aren't any IDE disk drives on the system, make sure
the CD-ROM is jumpered as Master or Single; many manufacturers ship PCs
with CD-ROM drives on the second IDE channel, jumpered as Slave.. but with
no master drive.  It might work in some cases, but it's not allowed for in
the IDE spec - there are no guarantees it'll work that way.  Oh, and of
course you should re-check all your cabling, power, and so on.  I'm
assuming it's an ATAPI CD-ROM drive, rather than one of the old
proprietary-interface jobs.

> I created a rescue and a root-floppies, partitioned the
> disk, but I didn't get the driver-floppies... So, this will go
> tonight... So, how do I get the CD-ROM recognized? Of course, there's
> still an option of installing the stuff over NFS... And - another worrying
> thing - during boot the kernel said something like:
> PCI BIOS ... at 0xyyyyyyyy in high mem - can't use...
> What does that mean? Also, it claims to recognize a network card AMD
> 79C970, whereas on the rare panel I don't see usual network connectors,
> but rather a strange longer than monitor and shorter than parallel
> connector with a network symbol drawn next to it... What's that?

Something like <...>?  It's probably an external SCSI connector.  I've
always found such things useful :)

Cheers

Richard

(and yes, I did steal my .sig quote from something I saw here a couple of
days ago <grin>)

-- 
Richard Stevenson, Systems Specialist, Xtra
Phone: +64 9 355 5231   Mobile: +64 25 290 3101   Pager: +64 26 100 155

"Microsoft warning us about the dangers of free software is like
  McDonalds warning us about cooking fresh vegetables at home."
        -- 03 May 2001 entry, http://scottandrew.com/

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