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[J-Golden]

Ok, so I gutted an old IBM server of it's raid tower. A 6 bay, 80 pin SCSI job that I hacked into my Cyberstorm. The 3 IBM HDs keep giving me erroers in it but Iput in a 37 Gig. Chetah and it works fine....

The erroer Given by Cyber SCSI is:

The sc_Length dma transfer length is smaller then the requested transfer length
This may be caused by a wrong length in the CMD[]
or by a unit firmware problem.

It then goes into other mumbo jumbo, but this is the bulk of it.

The three drives are identical IBM TYPECHS

any thoughts guys?

Tankz!

[Floid]

At first glance, the DCHSen may not be compliant with whatever the controller is asking of them, fairly obviously enough.

However, what exactly have you gutted here -- is it fully passive, are there active components or mystery jumpers? -- and are you completely sure of the basics like termination? (Similar drives didn't always come with termination packs soldered, even when the jumpers were present... Cost-savings when IBM or a customer knew they were destined for racks with external terminators. Custom disk ROMs and other mysterious things were also options.)

Harfed cabling *might* lead to corrupt transfers (and thus a change in returned length, as perceived at the controller end), though I'm not sure off the top of my head what checks might be in place against that.

<Edit>: There appears to be some interesting detail on the firmware handling for the DCHS drives here. However, the 'electronics board' is probably what we're concerned with...

A cheap shortcut that comes to mind, especially if you've got this all cabled up neatly as an external tower, would be to whack it onto a BSD or Linux machine with a known-good SCSI implementation, and see if you get any interesting and more Google-able error messages... The question is, of course, whether those systems will ever naturally initiate whatever kind or length of transfer is failing here. (Hey, maybe someone smarter than me will clear this up.)

With a little more detail, you could then go whining to Hitachi support, find out if the firmware in question is flashable -- if it's really a firmware issue -- or if they might have update ROMs collecting dust somewhere at a worthwhile price. (I've yet to look at DCHS specs, no idea if they came socketed or not.)</Edit>