Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 18:58:55 -0800 (PST) From: Chris Timmons <skynyrd@opus.cts.cwu.edu> To: "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@narnia.plutotech.com> Cc: FreeBSD-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Aic7xxx driver instability with the Quantum Atlas Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.95.970130184147.19079G-100000@opus.cts.cwu.edu> In-Reply-To: <199701281809.KAA22006@narnia.plutotech.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Justin - thanks very much for getting to the bottom of this. I have updated the firmware on two of my 4101KB Wide Atlas-I drives and can no longer reproduce the problem at will (with a dump of a huge file system to /dev/null.) Unfortunately running dsp.exe from a DOS floppy is not for the impatient nor faint of heart. It is S-L-O-W. I mean, does anybody recall loading stuff from tape on a VIC20? Those operations were speedy compared to this thing - even just trying to navigate around in the utility, never mind doing anything with disks. And although it says in the CodeLoad.txt file that post-upgrade "Inquiry data shown will now reflect the new code level", they failed to predict that I would not see the drive again until a power down restart. Gladly the next boot of todays -current showed that the firmware upgrade had been applied and that the drives had not been turned into "bricks" after all. I bought these drives (supposedly) new last November. The L915 firmware is reported to be of May, 1996 vintage by dsp.exe. I wonder how long it took for the new firmware to make it into production? Perhaps the vendor sold us stale drives. One nice feature of Seagate disks is that you can call up their 800 number, punch in the serial number of a drive and discover when it was manufactured. All I can say is, blargh. The drives run pretty good, but I've never had such a thrash with 'cudas and I am tempted to stick with them from now on. What if I hadn't been able to dig up easy-scsi? It ain't cheap, so I guess my options would have been to RMA 6 drives which were in production, or buy EZ-SCSI. Yick! On Tue, 28 Jan 1997, Justin T. Gibbs wrote: > This is just a heads up that the dreaded "Queue Full" problem with > the Quantum Atlas and the aic7xxx driver has been found. Unfortunately > the fix is not as simple as downloading a new version of the FreeBSD > driver. The problem is a bug in level 912 of the Atlas firmware. You > can obtain the necessary files to upgrade your firmware from Quantum's > ftp site. You will have to run Dos and Adaptec's ASPI drivers > in order to download the firmware to the drive. The URL is: > > ftp://ftp.qntum.com/pub/support/Firmware/Atlas > > Owners of Atlas-II drives may also want to look into upgrading their firmware > to the latest. The release notes of the upgrade I found mention a few tagged > queueing bugs although there is no mention of the "Queue Full" problem. Seeing > as the didn't mention it directly for the Atlas either, it may be that they > fixed the same problem for the Atlas-II as well. The URL is: > > ftp://ftp.qntum.com/pub/support/Firmware/Atlas-II > > I hope you all have many happy "Queue Full" free days ahead. 8-) > __ > Justin T. Gibbs > =========================================== > FreeBSD - Turning PCs into workstations > =========================================== > >
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.3.95.970130184147.19079G-100000>