disk controller problem?

[Tony Alfrey]

On Thursday 30 January 2003 05:39 am, Net Llama! wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, Tony Alfrey wrote:
> > Hi list.
> >
> > A not very linux-like question so please forgive me if it's
> > off-topic. My box has developed a worrisome problem.  When I reboot
> > (to switch back and forth to the Evil OS) my disk controller does
> > not see all of my hard drives.  My box is SCSI and the disk
> > controller is on the Intel motherboard.  It does not always 'miss'
> > the same drives.  Ctl-Alt-Del does not help, nor does the
> > front-panel reset button, but a full power down, wait a minute and
> > power up does fine.  It never misses a drive while the box is
> > running; only at reboot.
> > I hope it's a power supply problem since that is an easy fix. 
> > Nothing seems warm in the box;  I have lots of fans.
> > Any ideas?
>
> What kind of controller, 

The canonical Symbios 53C875 Ultra SCSI chipset

> and what kind of disks?  

Two 9 GB Seagates and an 18 GB Seagate.

> When its missing
> some disks, is it reassigning the SCSI IDs accordingly to the disks
> that it does see, or does it remember that the 'missing' ones exist,
> and keep the ID assignments the same?  

I'm not sure.  It's hard for me to see SCSI ID assignments if I don't 
boot an OS so I can then run fdisk.  I'll try a setup screen on boot-up 
but the bios setup does not "know" about SCSI, only IDE.  The bios 
diagnostic screen on boot-up does not show SCSI ID numbers, just info 
about sectors, model number, etc.

> Are you seeing errors, or just
> that sda is not being detected?  Do you need all the disks to boot
> up?

sda is the bootable drive (the one with a properly configured mbr) so if 
I don't get that one, I get zip.  Sometimes I get this one, sometimes 
not.  My boot manager in mbr (Boot Magic; just a chain loader) does not 
see the 'missing' disk partitions and then complains but will boot what 
it does see if I at least get sda.

-- 
Tony Alfrey
tonyalfrey at earthlink.net
"I'd Rather Be Sailing"