At 14:40 -0500 03/18/2002, Nancy L Haitz wrote: >What is the health status of your new but troubled system?
Oh, it's working fine. That long note I wrote really boiled down to, "are there any known issues between Retrospect and devices on the Fast Internal SCSI bus." I was able to get the CDRW to Restore the Retrospect backup just by moving the SCSI cable to the slow internal/external SCSI connector. But the thing is, it should work on either SCSI bus. I suspect that this S900 motherboard has a mildly hosed internal SCSI bus, but it's going to be several days before I have time to test it by moving the peripherals in question to a different motherboard. The Subject Line is kind of appropriate--my partner and I had a little boy a week ago Sunday, about six weeks earlier than expected, so things are rather hectic here. That new system is eating and breathing fine, but will be in the hospital for a few more weeks. So some Mac testing will be delayed. :-) The new Mac system has been very troubled from the beginning. I don't think I've ever had this many problems with a Mac. I originally wanted to use a PowerTower Pro motherboard in this system, but the board died. Then I resurrected it. Then it died again. So I dropped back to an S900 board. Hence the ATX to S900 power supply conversion (PTP uses an ATX PS), http://www.io.com/~trag/Umax_ATX_PS.sea.bin. And switching motherboards also meant dremeling out a different rear panel for the I/O ports. BTW, anyone need a template for the PTP rear ports? http://www.io.com/~trag/PTP_template. It's a desktop picture so you must download it. You can't view it in any of the browsers. I ran into an incompatibility between the VST UltraTech/66 and the Apple/Adaptec 2940U2B using OS 9.1. After two days of head pounding I thought I had it solved by dropping back to firmware 1.1 on the 2940U2B. But when I went to install OS 8.1 on a volume on this machine (running 9.1 primarily, but keep volumes with older OSs for old software compatibility) suddenly the problem came back worse than before. I finally had to punt the 2940U2B and drop back to a 2940UW. I really don't understand why the simple act of running the OS 8.1 installer (never booted under 8.1) brought the problem back--and why it wouldn't go away again after I reformated (low level format) everything and put it back the way it was when it worked. The first Yamaha 4416 I installed turns out to be dead. I've had it in a drawer for a couple of years so the warranty is dead too. It shows up on any SCSI utility you care to name, but it won't mount any disks or acknowledge that blank media is inserted. The second internal 4416 seems to be fine, other than that oddity with the Internal SCSI bus. The Plextor 20X I bought on Ebay initially worked great. Now sometimes it works but mostly it just grinds repetitiously. I'm going to pull it and put a SCSI DAT tape drive in it's place. I decided that between the 16X DVD and the 4416 CDRW I'm okay on CD reading. Happily, the Acer 16X DVD drive hasn't given me a single problem. It's on the VST UltraTech/66 card. Of course, maybe it caused the bizarre incompatibility with the 2940U2B. :-) I think that's all the problems I ran into assembling this thing. I guess if I was buying all new parts instead of using odds and ends I have in drawers it would have been easier but it also wouldn't have made sense financially. What I've ended up with is: Motherboard: S900 (perhaps with a bad SCSI Bus 0)--will probably replace with PTP motherboard when my friends and I are done shipping my second PTP MB across the country for testing. In the meantime, if I confirm that the SCSI port is bad, I'll put in a different S900 board. I have a few others laying around. Case: Server tower ATX case (six 5.25" front accessible bays, three 3.5" bays: two front accessible) Power Supply: PowMax Loadman 400 watt ATX RAM: 528 MB (may go to 1040 MB later) CPU: 200 MHz 604e (keeping the G3 and PowerBoost Pro card out of the main machine so they are available for testing other systems. Will go G3 or G4 later), not G3, but still much faster than my PPC601/120 based Power 120. PCI 1: Adaptec 2940UW--will replace with Initio Miles2 later, which hopefully will be compatible with VST card PCI 2: VST UltraTech/66 ATA66 controller PCI 3: Proformance III 16 MB video card (outperforms Radeon) PCI 4: Proformance III 16 MB video card PCI 5: Wired4DVD MPEG 2 hardware decoder for playing DVD movies PCI 6: empty, I really wanted a Firewire/USB card here, but the lower slot thing shot that down. Cooling: The PS has dual fans, one in, one out. Two bay coolers blowing air into 5.25" bays. Two rear 80 mm exhaust fans. One front 80 mm intake fan. All Panaflow hydrobearing fans, so very quiet. Hard Drives: Three LVD 18 GB Western Digital drives in striped RAID on 2940UW. I lose some performance as the three drives outperform the 2940UW. Hence the need for a U2W card. One 40 GB IBM 75GXP on the VST card. CD drives: Yamaha 4416 CDRW, Acer 16X DVD/40X CD, Plextor 20X.CDROM OS: 9.1 primarily, but there are four 1024 MB volumes for 9.1, 8.6, 7.6.1 and a backup 9.1. I really want to go to the PTP motherboard eventually though, so that I can add that Firewire/USB card. Heh, heh. Ask a simple question, get a novel. Jeff Walther -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | PowerON Computer Services <http://www.poweron.com> REPLACEMENT PARTS in STOCK Drives, CD-ROMs, RAM, Processors, Power Supply <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
