SCSI ribbon killed my hard drive?

[22dave66]

I wasn't expecting this to be my first post here after signing up very recently...... so the question is can a scsi ribbon cable destroy a hard drive?

With all this spare time i've been getting back into using my Amiga and everything was going fine until my boot drive died without warning yesterday, the drive was a Fujitsu 1gb scsi-2. With a manufacture date of 1995 i wasn't at all surprised and although it's really inconvenient i do have another Fujitsu (0.5gb) drive and enough backup tapes to start again.

I'm running a 45cm ribbon cable from the internal scsi connector (A3000) out to a mini tower case with it's own PSU and an internal 110cm ribbon cable connected to 4 scsi devices: 1gb hd (dead), 0.5gb hd, IBM cdrom, Archive Viper tape drive. The A3000 is terminated on the motherboard and the last device (tape) is terminted with the same type three resistor packs. There is one unused 50 pin "Harpoon" D shell type connector after the last drive and three unused IDC connectors in the ribbon. I've used this arrangement with the same computer since the mid 1990's.

Prior to the 1gb drive death everything was working ok and although i removed the dead drive, cdrom and tape drive i couldn't even boot from a small partition on the spare drive, just kept getting random Software Failed errors during the startup sequence. I moved the spare drive up the daisy chain to a previously unused connector but both partitions on the drive had disappeared on power up!

Lastly i unplugged the tower and connected the spare drive to the short ribbon in the Amiga and the bootable partition showed up but as a "Not a DOS disk" Luckily i had Quaterback Tools on a floppy and after a few hours managed to retrieve almost everything on the drive. Both partitions had "Invalid Bitmaps" and were full of errors.

Obviously that ribbon will go in the bin but i would really like to know what happened! Any ideas?

[fitzsteve]

I toasted a SCSI card with a bad cable (Blizzard SCSI Kit) one of the connections came loose so I reseated it and must've shorted a powered line, when I powered up it burned the SCSI Kit.

[Kin Hell]

Originally Posted by 22dave66

I wasn't expecting this to be my first post here after signing up very recently...... so the question is can a scsi ribbon cable destroy a hard drive?

With all this spare time i've been getting back into using my Amiga and everything was going fine until my boot drive died without warning yesterday, the drive was a Fujitsu 1gb scsi-2. With a manufacture date of 1995 i wasn't at all surprised and although it's really inconvenient i do have another Fujitsu (0.5gb) drive and enough backup tapes to start again.

I'm running a 45cm ribbon cable from the internal scsi connector (A3000) out to a mini tower case with it's own PSU and an internal 110cm ribbon cable connected to 4 scsi devices: 1gb hd (dead), 0.5gb hd, IBM cdrom, Archive Viper tape drive. The A3000 is terminated on the motherboard and the last device (tape) is terminted with the same type three resistor packs. There is one unused 50 pin "Harpoon" D shell type connector after the last drive and three unused IDC connectors in the ribbon. I've used this arrangement with the same computer since the mid 1990's.

Prior to the 1gb drive death everything was working ok and although i removed the dead drive, cdrom and tape drive i couldn't even boot from a small partition on the spare drive, just kept getting random Software Failed errors during the startup sequence. I moved the spare drive up the daisy chain to a previously unused connector but both partitions on the drive had disappeared on power up!

Lastly i unplugged the tower and connected the spare drive to the short ribbon in the Amiga and the bootable partition showed up but as a "Not a DOS disk" Luckily i had Quaterback Tools on a floppy and after a few hours managed to retrieve almost everything on the drive. Both partitions had "Invalid Bitmaps" and were full of errors.

Obviously that ribbon will go in the bin but i would really like to know what happened! Any ideas?

Never heard of a SCSI Cable killing a hard drive before. Not possible from what I know of SCSI.

As a matter of interest, did the Failed Hard Drive (the one you removed) have Termination enabled? - Check Jumpers on removed device for Drive settings.

[22dave66]

Originally Posted by Kin Hell

Never heard of a SCSI Cable killing a hard drive before. Not possible from what I know of SCSI.

As a matter of interest, did the Failed Hard Drive (the one you removed) have Termination enabled? - Check Jumpers on removed device for Drive settings.

It just seems a little fishy when the other drive went haywire at the same time.

No termination enabled and resistor pack removed, drive was set as device zero.

BTW when are you going to let us back into Cornwall

[22dave66]

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

I toasted a SCSI card with a bad cable (Blizzard SCSI Kit) one of the connections came loose so I reseated it and must've shorted a powered line, when I powered up it burned the SCSI Kit.

Ouch! Back in the day when i had patience and good eyesight i would reuse ribbon connectors. Tearing the ribbon off would always result in few pins coming out but they would usually go back in, crazy!

[Kin Hell]

Originally Posted by 22dave66

It just seems a little fishy when the other drive went haywire at the same time.

No termination enabled and resistor pack removed, drive was set as device zero.

BTW when are you going to let us back into Cornwall

Weird one....

Can't see why removing a Drive would fux0r the whole bus....

Then again, if the drive Died whilst other partitions were being written to, you might get corruption.

Seen some crazy stuff in my A3000 days though. I had a Viper Streamer as well. Mine was in an External box too but had to be the Last device without Termination. I had a Micropolis 5.25 half Height Hard drive before the Viper & had Termination set on the Micropolis Drive. Just could not get the Viper to work inside a Terminated Bus.

Don't know what else to suggest buddy other than; "You can come back to Cornwall when Boris says so!"