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Where is my SCSI card? 30 August 2010
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At the start of the month, Jerry was over helping me to add more HDD to my Bacula Storage Daemon. As part of that process, I moved my tape library from my Bacula server over to the Storage Daemon. This required the transfer of a SCSI card from one machine to another. Jerry helped with that too. At that time, I didn't both to check the card or the library.

Yesterday, I noticed the SCSI card (an Adaptec AHA-2944UW) was not appearing in the dmsg(8) output. However, it turned out to be easy to fix.

Watching the boot process

While watching the boot process, I saw this message:

Adaptec AHA-2944UW Differential SCSI BIOS v 2.20.0
(c) 1999 Adaptec, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Can't Locate Host Adapter

SCSI BIOS Not Installed!

It was suggested that I try moving the card to another slot. That would have to wait for another day. I'm still nursing a broken arm. I was meeting my mountain biking friend John the next day for lunch. He came by and did the heavy lifting. We swapped the video card and the SCSI card and rebooted.

Now I see:

Adaptec AHA-2944UW Differential SCSI BIOS v 2.20.0
(c) 1999 Adaptec, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

<<< Press <Ctrl><A> for SCSISelect(TM) Utility! >>>

I pulled the following lines out of the dmesg output from today:

Aug 29 14:49:15 kraken kernel: ahc0: <Adaptec 2944 Ultra SCSI adapter> port 0xa800-0xa8ff mem 0xfb7df000-0xfb7dffff irq 20 at device 5.0 on pci1
Aug 29 14:49:15 kraken kernel: vgapci0: <VGA-compatible display> mem 0xfb800000-0xfbbfffff,0xfb7f0000-0xfb7fffff irq 21 at device 6.0 on pci1

Looking at the boot from yesterday, I see:

Aug 28 17:39:54 kraken kernel: vgapci0: <VGA-compatible display> mem 0xfb400000-0xfb7fffff,0xfbbd0000-0xfbbdffff irq 20 at device 5.0 on pci1

You will notice that the VGA card has moved from irq 20 to irq 21. The SCSI card is on irq 20.

More importantly, I have my tape drive:

sa0 at ahc0 bus 0 scbus12 target 5 lun 0
sa0: <DEC TZ89     (C) DEC 1837> Removable Sequential Access SCSI-2 device
sa0: 20.000MB/s transfers (10.000MHz, offset 8, 16bit)

And the tape library:

ch0 at ahc0 bus 0 scbus12 target 0 lun 0
ch0: <DEC TL800    (C) DEC 0326> Removable Changer SCSI-2 device
ch0: 20.000MB/s transfers (10.000MHz, offset 8, 16bit)
ch0: 10 slots, 1 drive, 1 picker, 0 portals

With this simple move, I can now proceed with my goal of Disk to Disk to Tape backups.


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