SCSI Problem

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I’m having a strange problem with W2K /SP2. I have an Adaptec 2920A SCSI card attached to a scanner (HP4C) and a 1GB Jaz drive. On bootup the peripherals will work or I may find there is an error with the SCSI card and the Jaz and scanner will not work. If I reboot – possibly several times – or shut down for awhile and restart, the card may initialize and the peripherals will work. Once it is working, it will work until the system is rebooted or is powered off. Basically it is a crap shoot as to whether the card will work or not. It seems the card is not bad since it does work and same for the driver – fd16_7001. No changes are being made to the system to warrant a problem. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? The driver has been replaced with no change in behavior.

Thanks,
Bob

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Possibly a (intermittent) terminator problem:

Properly Connecting SCSI Devices to Windows NT (Q101352)

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What you are describing certainly sounds like a hardware problem – intermittent, non-reproduceable – but I wold suggest changing slots in the motherboard and double-checking your BIOS settings first. make sure the BIOS doesn’t have its own SCSI BIOS enabled. No other way you can get a hold of a SCSI card to check and be sure?

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I had a similar problem with a HP Scanjet 4c.

My machine had 3 SCSI cards, 2 of them an Adaptec 2940U2W and the other an Adpatec 2920. From time to time and without rhyme nor reason the scanner would be invisible to the SCSI system (but the scanner would work in the 2940U2Ws). It was intermittent and nothing I did seemed to fix it. The problem was that it was unreliable and I’d never know when it would go faulty.

Eventually, I upgraded the motherboard (which was not faulty, I just wanted a faster system, from 500MHz processor to a 1,400MHz one), everything else remained the same and this completely fixed the problem.

It seems that the 2920 may be critical in its PCI timing configurations becasue this is the second time I’ve had a problem with it. Before I put the card ino the machine whose motherboard I upgraded I tested it in a test machine and it was faulty (intermittent) in this one too. At the time of the testing I just assumed the problem was that the test machine had been fiddled with too much and the BOIS probably needed resetting.

The first two motherboards were MSI (both different) and the new one that the card works with is a BioStar M7V1B. I don’t have the MSI board details immediately to hand.

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I’d run the Adaptec supplied SCSI diagnostics.
And, if any, Iomega diagnostics for the Jaz drive.

Also, disconnect and reseat the SCSI card and connected devices. Connections sometimes get loose/dirty.

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Thanks for the replies guys. I’ve reset all the cables and checked the termination but it still works as previously described. One thing I forgot to mention in the original post and I apologize for that, is that this same hardware configuration worked fine with NT4 /SP4-6a. When I moved to W2K, I did a clean install. I’ve had problems ever since. I guess it’s time to bite the bullet and get a new SCSI card or try a USB to SCSI connection.

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Found this at Microsoft’s Hardware Compatibility List website:

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Adaptec Inc.
AHA – 2920A

Device Notes:

——————————————————————————–
This Device meets the following logo-level classifications:

Windows 98: No Test Data
Windows Me: No Test Data
Windows NT4 x86: No Test Data
Windows 2000: Basic Compatibility Requirements
Windows XP: No Test Data
Windows XP 64-Bit: No Test Data

No additional notes are available at this time.

Drivers:

——————————————————————————–
No drivers or updates are available at this time.

Last Updated: Monday, January 21, 2002

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