From: Ben Lippolt (bjl@loki.research.ptt.nl)
Date: 08/03/93


From: bjl@loki.research.ptt.nl (Ben Lippolt)
Subject: Old Sun-3 SCSI (ESDI?) disk on Adaptec 1542c?
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1993 07:39:33 GMT

Hi,

I'm trying to connect an old disk from a Sun-3 to a PC running Linux (99.11).
The disk is an Emulex MD21 307 Mb. I'm a little confused about the type
of the disk. I always thought it was a SCSI, but my ADAPTEC 1542C says
ESDI. It recognises the disk and I can format, and verify it. The real
disk geometry is: cyl 896, hd 14, alt 3, sec 50. The 1542c seems to map
this to: cyl 307, hd 64, sec 32.

When I boot Linux, it recognises the disk, but somehow it sees it twice. I do
have /dev/sda and can make a partition table, but when I try to write
that partition table I get some error messages. But the next time I boot, the
newly created partition table is correctly found. When I try to make a
filesystem on the disk I get the following error message:

   SCSI host 0 timed out - aborting command

I saw some messages about possible problems with the Linux Adaptec 1542c
driver.

- Might this be an occurance of the same problem?

- Does anyone know whether it is possible at all to connect such an old
  disk to a 1542c and make it really work?

Ben Lippolt