HDD GURU FORUMS

Hello everyone.

I have an older Cray "supercomputer" (now slower than a desktop PC) that I'm working to get running and online.
Latest bottleneck is that it doesn't seem to be happy just using any SCSI hard drive. From what I can tell, it's looking for disks with the vendor name set to the specific Cray part #. Not too different than what Compaq/NetApp/EMC and those companies do.

My only source of information is another group that has one of these systems working. Theirs has the original hard drives.

They have told me that theirs uses Seagate ST19171WD disks (part # 9E0004-001) and that the firmware is custom, as the disk sectoring is non-standard.

So what I'm looking for is a means by which to kindly ask them to download the firmware from one of their disks, so we can hopefully re-flash or write new firmware to similar drives.

I'm still a slight bit concerned because the part # and description they gave is of a Wide-Differential disk, yet the IO subsystem on the Cray that we're trying to get working has Interphase 6u VME single ended controllers, and there are no signal level converters in between the drives and controllers.

Later today I'm going to hook a WD disk and see if the system can see the drive's ID at least.

Any advice on the firmware would be appreciated. I've googled and seen a number of utilities to update the firmware, but when it comes to downloading existing firmware I'm at a loss. Platform doesn't matter (Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD, etc).

Any advice appreciated!

telmnstr wrote: but when it comes to downloading existing firmware I'm at a loss.

This process is vendor specific (unlike the update process which can be issued with standard SCSI command) and vendors didn't release tools to read FW from the drives
That's why you cannot find it

Sorry can't help on the firmware upload/download process.
Nor on the disk i/o IF on a Cray (Though the I/O went through a front end minicomputer?)
But just for info, here's an interesting artcile on building your own Cray 1 compatible computer!
(you probably know about it, but others on here might find it interesting)
http://chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/

Yea, I saw the Cray fpga, he asked if we could hook him up with access for testing some stuff. I havent checked to see if there is a normal prom/eprom/eeprom on the disk controller, but I'm under the impression the firmware sits on disk platter in a protected area. Any way to bitbang reading it out using serial connection?

Back in the olden days of scsi hard drives when they were 8" we used seagates seatools to upload firmware versions.

Just try formatting the drive to the sector size that it's supposed to be. It probably doesn't need any specific model name or part number, just needs to have the correct sector size.

I can modify this disk firmware, PM Me or Scsitool@Hotmail.com


From:http://www.scsitool.net