🚀 go-pugleaf

Having finally tracked down an NCR PCI-SCSI card (32 quid plus VAT &
delivery from VIP 0161-877-3111) I've just spent the most frustrating
weekend (up till 03:30 last night!) trying to get this damn card to
work reliably with all my drives & all my operating systems.

I've come to the comclusion that either I have a defective card or
that the NCR810 is not going to work in my PC. It seems that there are
several variants on this card using the same chip. It seems odd that I
have seen several reports of CD-ROMs not working & Windows 95 not
working whereas others report no problems. Perhaps those of us with
the problems have the bad cards?

Major problem number 1 is that I could not access my CD-ROM drive
(Panasonic 504 SCSI-II only about 6 months old) from DOS whichever
drivers DOSCAM, MINICAM,CDROM.SYS etc that I loaded. Just got a
message that the drive wasn't ready while the drive light blipped on.
The driver diskette that came with the board was a couple of years old
& I was able to find the Web site containing the latest drivers
(www.symbios.com) With the version 4 drivers I finally got to be able
to do a DIR of the CD-ROM. Unfortunately if I ejected the CD-ROM &
replaced it with another or even just opened the drawer & closed it
again then I was again unable to access the drive until I rebooted.

The second major problem for me was that in a seemingly random fashion
the system would hang while booting Windows 95. If I then restarted in
Safe Mode removed the SCSI controller, rebooted, got it to see the new
hardware & then load the drivers there was a very good chance that it
would then reboot successfully. Unfortunately it would not then
restart again. In fact even when it did boot successfully after using
the system for a time it would hang or I would get a blue screen
saying that it was unable to write to C:

I tried everything conceivable to try & fix this. My initial
assumption is that as with most SCSI problems it was lack of
termination somewhere but I tried all variations & it would fail with
just a single internal drive.

I diddled all sorts of things in the BIOS e.g. forcing it to use
IRQ14. I have a Plug & Play BIOS that allows me to leave the interrupt
of the PCI slot as AUTO, IRQ14, IRQ14 & IRQ15. I eventually stripped
all the other cards out except the PCI graphics card to check that
there wasn't a conflict of any sort. I then swapped out the PCI
graphics card for an ISA one & still had the problem.

I am at a loss to explain the problem (unless the card is defective)
particularly as the faults seem so random in nature. The particularly
annoying feature is that for a short while when it was working under
Windows 95 I was able to run some Adaptec benchmark programs which
demonstrated that all the disks but especially my new Seagate Hawk 1Gb
disk absolutely scream along with this controller. Transfer rates for
my old drives were doubled & quadrupled for the Seagate. Total
bandwidth on the SCSI bus was about 3.5Mb/s hammering all drives vs.
1.2Mb/s with the ISA card. The whole system subjectively was markedly
faster too.

At the moment I've given up on it & have returned to using my Adaptec
1540B which while a hell of a lot slower is 100% reliable. Unless
someone has some bright ideas I'm going to have to give up on this.
I'm deeply reluctant to spend three times as much on an Adaptec 2940
but may be reduced to that having seen how good performance can be
with a PCI SCSI controller.

--
Nigel Barker
nigel@openvms.demon.co.uk