Weird SCSI problem...

[uberlad]

I have a cheap @ss SCSI adapetr in my machine (A Tekram 395U to be exact), with a pair of drives on it: A pioneer DVD305S (Multireagion hacked) and a Yamaha CRW2100S 16x cd burner.

They seem to work fine on their own, but if I have a disc in both drives then the whole system becomes very flaky, and the DVD drive is constantly stopping and spinning up again ,as if it's forgotten what it was doing.

Also the Yamaha refuses to rip audio, demonstrating similar behaviour (spins up, then forgets and causes the program to time out).

Anyone got a lot of SCSI experience and /or has any idea why the two drives might be fighting? Is it likely to be the cheap card, whose drivers were last updated for win2k. Both of the drives say that they'll auto-terminate the chain, and the Pioneer is actually at the termination point.

I can live with it, but as I@m planning on moving to WinXP soon I'd like to get these drives behaving, or consider gettign a bottom-of-the-range adaptec card, because at least XP has native drivers for those.

Thanks,

Uberlad

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oops, extra sys specs....
Abit KT7, TBird 750@1000, anything else relevant?

[dZeus]

the drives will autoterminate? is that with SCAM or something?

I always set termination manual on the last device on the chain, and never had such problems (I never use SCAM because it adds a lot of extra time during bootup).

[uberlad]

I may have been a fool all these years.......

I@ll force them to my will this evening after work.

Thanks,

Uberlad

[spoogenet]

Don't know what SCAM is, but I've always used autotermination on all my SCSI drives, I haven't had any issues yet. I've got 1 HD on the UW bus and 1 HD and 3 CD drives (burner, DVD, regular CD) on the SCSI-1 chain, all set to auto.

I'd probably guess that it's a controller problem, but I'll leave that decision up to more experience people.

b

[uberlad]

WEll, the Yamaha _was_ set to termination, but settign it to non-termination hasn't improved its ability to rip audio. Althgouh it does now spin up to full speed and just stay there until I eject the CD, which is more entertaining.

I@m not convinced by the whole system, i think I'll leave it for the mo, and see if it improves once I have a clean install of winXP to test it on. This winME install is pretty old, and has had a variety of things on it over the months that could have messed up the entire thing.

Ta for the advice guys, I@ll ask again if it still plays up on a reinstall.

Uberlad