🚀 go-pugleaf

I have put two NeXT Magneto-Optical Disk Drives into my cube (an 030), and 
thought you all might be interested in the results. Also there are some 
problems and I would be very interested if anyone had an idea about the 
reasons for them and whether there was any cure other than avoiding doing 
the things that cause the problems.

I have my Hard disk now in an external case. The two MO drives are 
attached via one of the cables that was originally shipped with the first 
cubes. It had two connectors such that one could presumably attach two MO 
drives. With the 2.0 upgrade a new cable with a single connector was 
shipped and the official NeXT position is that two MO drives is not 
supported.

The first thing that happens is that on initial power up the boot hangs. 
It says something about a failed attempt to write to od?a but no error. 
This happens whether or not there are disks inside of the drives. But if I 
then do a <command>~ and restart, everything comes up fine.

The second thing that happens is that if I put a disk into the first drive 
(od0a) the whole system panics. If, however there is a disk placed within 
the second (od1a) drive first, placing a disk in the first drive is fine. 
In fact, one must put a disk into the first drive after putting one into 
the second drive, because if you don't, the disk in the second drive 
continually spins up and down. If both drives contain disks the system 
seems to work fine and I have had absolutely no problem copying data from 
disk to disk, which is why I want to have two drives in the first place.

I can eject the disks in any order, but unless one ejects both of them the 
remaining drive will start spinning down and up continuously until it is 
ejected, or the other drive has a disk placed within it.

There has also been an occasional panic when I ejected a disk from the 
second drive while there was some process going on which was accessing the 
first drive. But this has rarely happened.

There was one difference in behavior between the 2.1 system and 3.0. In 
2.1, when I powered down the system would panic, then do an automatic 
restart. The panic would occur after the disk was set clean, so this panic 
did not cause a disk check to occur on next power up. In 3.0, the system 
shuts down cleanly with no panic.

One of my coworkers wondered if perhaps there were some jumpers that 
should be connected on the second drive to set it to be a different number 
than the first, and if this would reduce some of the problems that were 
occurring.

Again, any and all information which could be provided regarding this 
situation would be gratefully received.

Hal Brokaw
hal@imagine.com