Adaptec 2372A + 2 drives

John Cheng jcheng at b.gp.cs.cmu.edu
Mon Jan 1 12:05:42 AEST 1990


Configuration: DELL 310 with 8 MEGS and ESIX REV C.

The system has been working fine with an adaptec 2372A controller and
a miniscribe 6128 110MB RLL drive. The difficulty is in installing a
seagate 4144r RLL hard disk as a 2nd drive. Both the disk manager
software and the built in BIOS on the controller could not communicate with the
seagate drive initially while attempting to low-level format the drive.
Since one of the errors from the disk manager program is FAIL drive RECAL,
out of desparation, I installed the jumper J14 Position 4 which was described
in the manual as: "Drive recal goes to track 0 minus 1 (ST-238)
Installed:Disabled". That seems to do the trick and I was able to
low-level format the seagate drive after that. After using the diskadd
utility in ESIX, I was able to install it. However, every so often,
about once every half an hour, the disk read/write to a partition on the
second disk (the seagate) would hang the system. While processing
running in memory is not affected, it would stop once it requests any
disk service. My question is what does this Jumper do. My three attempts
call adaptec tech support have been met with busy signals. Also, would a
newer revison of the adaptec 2372 controller (i.e. B) likely to make a
difference? This intermittent failure of the controller and the seagate
drive combination also happens in DOS. Please reply to
kwan at icsl.ucla.edu.

Thanks, Tom



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