Hello! Is there anybody out there who could possibly help me understand why I’m not able to see these 80 pin SCSI drives on my system? I’ve tried multiple controller cards, adapters, cables, drives and several machines.

I have an LSI20320IE and an Adaptec 29160N card and a few different SCA80 adapters. The cards are connected to the adapters with a 68 pin terminated cable. I have the appropriate drivers but I’m not even able to see the HDDs in post.

I see the LSI card, but when I connect a drive it says “Device set to narrow” and hangs forever. And the computer sees the Adaptec card but after the SCSI utility screen pops up the OS boots up.

I’ve tried three different adapters now, and every jumper setting. I wonder if there is some sort of compatibility issue with the different generation of SCSI interfaces? Do I have a termination problem?

My only ideas at this point are to try a 50 pin cable (since both the Adaptec controller and the adapter have this) or a self terminating adapter to rule out termination as the issue.

Any suggestions you may have would be greatly appreciated. This thing is driving me crazy.

Thanks,
Aaron

Did you configure the Controller properly via pressing the key combination in bios? Set up the port where the cable is connected? Chosed the right port on the cable and/or set the jumper accordingly?

And you are shure, that the drive is ok?

I do believe so. The cards are detected in the SCSI utility with the correct Host Adapter ID. I messed with the settings ad nauseam and eventually just set them back to default.

And as far as the drive in concerned, I have tried several known good drives and I am not able to get any of them to show up.

Are there maybe any Jumpers directly on the drive or on the SCSI-Card?

How many ports do the cable have? Did you try all ports? Did you check the pins of the calble-ports?

Maybe this helps?

https://www.ardent-tool.com/SCSI/Mixing ... -wide.html

or this:

https://256stuff.com/gray/docs/scsi

or this:

http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/user_g ... erence.pdf

Thanks, I appreciate the suggestions. I will look through those links you sent.

There are no jumpers on any of the drives I have. But I have read about some drives needing resistors manually installed or removed for proper termination.

There are a few possible jumper posts on one side of the Adaptec card labeled J4, J5 etc. But nothing on the LSI.

I have 2 cables. One is a rounded cable, and one is a braided cable with maybe 7 ports and a terminator. I have tried all of the ports.

I will try to get some photos posted later today.

Thanks again

Possible problem1: Your mobo wants to boot and load the UEFI-kompatible ROM on the card. The card is possibly to old to have that. Pull the card, set your mobo to CSM-boot/mode, activate INT19 hook/interrupt, save, reboot. Plug card back in, check if that changes anything to disc detection.

Possible problem2: This board has a problem with SMBUS (consumer boards mostly don't like this, they expect a GPU in their x16 slots and react strange with server stuff, HBAs etc.), try taping the pins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBnNaheYmdA
Sry for bad links, site is dead:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220705151 ... /1226.html
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sas+hbapcie+p ... 1.jpg&t=h_

Another good idea would be to check another mainboard, if you have that laying around.

Hope this helps (has pictures):
http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/user_g ... erence.pdf
http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/instal ... _guide.pdf

ID#7 for the HBA is correct, the long cable has a terminator (also correct) = auto termination. Is there something to set accordingly in this menu 'Host Adapter SCSI Termination' ?

Have you tried connecting all disks at once, so there are no empty connectors?

I have tried multiple mother boards. Most did not like the cards at all, but a Dell Precision worked the best. I don't see that setting on this Asrock mobo I'm using but I'll keep looking. I might have to revisit the Dell as I'm pretty sure it has that option.

The Adaptec is an older PCI card and the LSI is PCIe. Not sure whether or not that matters to the SMBUS. But I did try taping those pins with no luck. Very interesting though! I feel like I've done something similar to get an LSI SAS card to work in the past.

The Host adapter termination is set to automatic by default. I've tried that and switched it to Enabled. Didn't seem to make a difference.

And I had not tried hooking up multiple drives. I tried this with the 3 adapters I have, leaving 3 open but nothing changed.

Thanks for the links, I will look through those now.

Yeah, sometimes it's just try and error. On some mainboards, switching from UEFI/CSM viceversa after rebooting and re-entering the BIOS unlocks previously hidden functions (INT19 could be something like that) or really dumb, a PCI-E card in SLOT1 prevents a post, where it works fine in SLOT2 etc.


I don't know either, I've only had experience with PCIe so far. I know from my ASUS boards from the 2013/2014 era with HBA that sometimes they don't post at all without tape and when they do, the board suddenly only shows half the amount of RAM. But you read about exactly the strange cases in forums when you deal with controllers, HBAs, crossflashing, etc.


I have no experience with the 'old' SCSI, but if I remember correctly, once termination is involved there can be no free slots, kind of like with BNC networks.

More info: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/scsi.htm



Some ideas:
-Try setting this SCSI Termination to off (maybe this terminator on the cable already does some automagic or unwanted thing)
-If you connect only one disk, set ID1 for the HBA. Try different disks, maybe you have luck with the one with ID0.

Some Fujitsu documents ...

https://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/COMP/fcpa/hdd/discontinued/man-10k-rpm_prod-manual.pdf
https://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/COMP/fel/support/disk/manuals/HDDQVa4.v3.pdf
https://ftp.hydata.com/Downloads/scsitools/scsitools.DRT/Resources/LOD_FactoryMadeLOD-Files/Fujitsu/AL7LE-MAN/C141-E123-01EN.pdf

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

What does Adaptec's LVD-TE (J4) termination jumper do?

This user seems to have the same configuration:

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=24327

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

It doesn't seem to do anything that I could tell. The jumpers are in close proximity to each port, I was hoping that they might instruct which port was active. I couldn't find any info on what they actually do. Here is a better picture of the card, with arrows pointed to the jumpers.

EDIT: Actually when I put a jumper on J4 the computer doesn't boot into the OS. It stays on the initial Adaptec screen.