What kind of HDD do you have installed (manufacturer, model)?

Basically you have terminated controller and the end of the narrow cable.
Trunks like your HDD caddy must not terminate, so be sure that the HDD has termination disabled.
(In your situation you do not need to care about high-byte-termination.)
HDDs may have a jumper for termination and term power.
Just one device should deliver power for termination. Basically this is the job of your controller.

If you don't get it working with those hints,
try to change the ID from your HDD to 1
try to force your controller and devices to asynchronous mode (in your controller's BIOS).

But if it hangs during detection, it may be a problem with the disk size too. I'm more familiar with Adaptec and NCR/Symbios/LSI-Logic controllers.

They all seem to be IBM Ultrastar 18.2GB. I don't see anything which suggests a way to set termination on it, on the top, bottom, front or rear. There are some jumpers underneath but those seem like compatibility features, like delaying or disabling it from starting up, or setting the ID when it's not in a caddy.

It only seems to hang when trying to start the system; when scanning them in the SCSI BIOS settings, it just doesn't detect anything. I would think that once over 8GB, the next boundary would be 32GB? These are well under that.

teh_Foxx0rz wrote on 2023-11-06, 16:04:

With no cable connected, the SCSI card doesn't try to do anything and lets me boot into Windows (98). However, with the cables connected, and regardless of whether the hard drive caddy is inserted into its bay or not, it never seems to detect a drive, and simply hangs while saying "LUN:0-0". The SCSI drive is set to ID 0.

With no a cable connected you should at least see the SCSI card searching for a device, at which point I suppose you should also be able to enter its bios and make some settings. and continue to boot.
With a cable connected you should at least see the same thing and continue to boot.
With an adapter/Caddy connected but no real device, you should still see the same thing and continue to boot.
With a hdd connected it should see the device, hook the bios and continue to boot.

If it hangs at LUN:0-0 with the cables attached yet no hard drive attached it would, to me, indicate you have a problem with what is attached, either cable or caddy.

Looking at the manual, it's meant to detect the drive and say "SCSI BIOS Installed!" But this never happens. And I'm not sure what it means for a SCSI BIOS to be "installed"; the card is already installed, and presumably it can't be something which needs to be installed onto the hard drive, since not all SCSI devices are storage devices.

with no drive attached it is not uncommon for the SCSI bios to not attach itself to the interrupt routines that handle disk access.

I've poked around in the SCSI card's BIOS settings, but I couldn't see anything that would warrant me changing things from the default. There's an option to enable compatibility with drives over 8GB set by default, but the drives are ~18GB. I don't really know entirely what all the other settings do, but I'm not trying to do anything too specific, so none of them seemed relevant to change. Checking for device information inside the SCSI settings also comes up saying that there's no device detected.

Any setting regarding Termination and SCSI controller ID ?

Also, connecting a wide 68pin hdd to a narrow 40pin controller can sometimes give extra headaches due to hdd firmware not expecting being used on a narrow scsi bus, trying to talk wide and failing. Sometimes using an adapter that terminates the high byte helps in these circumstances.

Okay, it's a LVD capable SCA (80 pin) device.
SCA devices may not care about termination. ID may be setup in caddy holder.

Are you sure your SCA caddy has wired DIFFSENSE pin correctly? If not, it may be compatible with a LVD SCSI bus, but not a SE bus.
I have had an issue where this situation has blocked the whole SCSI bus.

Please just follow this topic:
Cheap SCA adapters from China

Its an 80pin SCA drive.
You need a different adapter to do what you want to do. The adapter you have is useful but not for you in this instance.

You will need an SCA to 50pin adapter that has a SCSI ID selector on it.

Something along the lines of this.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/266362556549?hash= … ABk9SR7Cqq9r0Yg

It will allow you to give the hard disk its own SCSI ID on the bus, it will need to be given an ID that isnt already in use. I dont know what ID your SCSI controller card is using so cant advise an ID but as a for instance your controller card could be ID 5 so you can set any ID from a pool of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7.

Once it has an ID it will register on the bus and the controller will no longer hang on ID0 LUN0 scan.

You do have the right idea on the cabling though, it would be
Controller card - cable - HDD - cable - Term
Or
Controller card - cable - HDD - cable - HDD - Term for 2 disks on the bus.

What you could try in the mean time is on the picture you have 2 sets of jumper pins, on the left side there are the pins to set the SCSI bus ID, you need to use those to give it an ID.
But IBM SCSI disks use jumper pins that are closer together than most jumper pins so a normal size jumper block is to big. Fuse wire to bridge the pins might work...
I dont know if this method will work, Ive never tried it, but it might be an option.

In addition to that, I dont know the controller card, I dont know if it will auto select SE or LVD over the bus, so you might need to jumper pin 5 on the left hand set of pins to enable Force SE.

The drive caddies do have an ID selector dial on their rear, which as mentioned, I've set to 0.
And yeah, that first option is what I've done with the cabling.
I suppose I could try "Force SE".

There's no termination options in the SCSI BIOS, but I can set the SCSI Controller ID in there, which is set to 7.

Though, would it be simpler to just get myself a wide, LVD SCSI controller with the right cable to connect directly to this caddy, rather than fuss around with figuring out that other thread and testing pin continuity and soldering for this DIFFSENSE pin?

teh_Foxx0rz wrote on 2023-11-06, 17:50:

The drive caddies do have an ID selector dial on their rear, which as mentioned, I've set to 0. And yeah, that first option is w […]
Show full quote

The drive caddies do have an ID selector dial on their rear, which as mentioned, I've set to 0.
And yeah, that first option is what I've done with the cabling.
I suppose I could try "Force SE".

There's no termination options in the SCSI BIOS, but I can set the SCSI Controller ID in there, which is set to 7.

Though, would it be simpler to just get myself a wide, LVD SCSI controller with the right cable to connect directly to this caddy, rather than fuss around with figuring out that other thread and testing pin continuity and soldering for this DIFFSENSE pin?

Yeah I dont know what dock youre talking about but it wouldnt matter what the ID selector is set to.
SCA is designed to get its ID from the controller. You dont have to set anything on the drive if youre using it properly, as designed.
Right now youre not trying to do that, so you have to do something different.

The Selector on the back of a SCSI dock could be used, but the selector is in 3 parts, if will have a selector of some kind on the outside of the case, a cable and a block on the end that should go into the jumper pins that set the SCSI ID.
If that isnt where that block is, on the jumper pins on the drive then it will never work. The only SCSI cable that can set the device ID is an SCA cable, and you are trying to use an SCA to 50pin adapter so its impossible for that to work because the signals wont carry through to the controller card.

If you set your SCSI setup like I told you to it will work.
If you try what I told you in the last part of my post it might work.
If you carry on trying to set the ID like you are then it wont work.

Your call.

ID 7 is the highest priority on the bus and is what the controller card should be set to.

You dont need any termination settings in the BIOS of the card. There is nothing wrong with how it is, at least you dont know if there are any problems with it, you havent gone far enough down the road to find out.

The problem you have is the device doesnt have an ID set, you think it is but it isnt. That is why you have the result you do. The SCSI bus senses the device but it cant talk to it as it doesnt have an ID so it hangs, and once it times out it will either stay hung or press on without loading the BIOS into memory and the OS will boot etc etc.

You dont need a different controller, you just need to set it up properly.
You dont need to solder anything if you get the adapter I posted a link to in my last post.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-11-06, 18:31:

Yeah I dont know what dock youre talking about but it wouldnt matter what the ID selector is set to. SCA is designed to get its […]
Show full quote

teh_Foxx0rz wrote on 2023-11-06, 17:50:

The drive caddies do have an ID selector dial on their rear, which as mentioned, I've set to 0. And yeah, that first option is w […]
Show full quote

The drive caddies do have an ID selector dial on their rear, which as mentioned, I've set to 0.
And yeah, that first option is what I've done with the cabling.
I suppose I could try "Force SE".

There's no termination options in the SCSI BIOS, but I can set the SCSI Controller ID in there, which is set to 7.

Though, would it be simpler to just get myself a wide, LVD SCSI controller with the right cable to connect directly to this caddy, rather than fuss around with figuring out that other thread and testing pin continuity and soldering for this DIFFSENSE pin?

Yeah I dont know what dock youre talking about but it wouldnt matter what the ID selector is set to.
SCA is designed to get its ID from the controller. You dont have to set anything on the drive if youre using it properly, as designed.
Right now youre not trying to do that, so you have to do something different.

The Selector on the back of a SCSI dock could be used, but the selector is in 3 parts, if will have a selector of some kind on the outside of the case, a cable and a block on the end that should go into the jumper pins that set the SCSI ID.
If that isnt where that block is, on the jumper pins on the drive then it will never work. The only SCSI cable that can set the device ID is an SCA cable, and you are trying to use an SCA to 50pin adapter so its impossible for that to work because the signals wont carry through to the controller card.

If you set your SCSI setup like I told you to it will work.
If you try what I told you in the last part of my post it might work.
If you carry on trying to set the ID like you are then it wont work.

Your call.

you are incorrect. The issue is that selector. please change it to anything other than zero. I recommend 1. SCA scsi drives DO have SCSI ID "jumpers", they are set by the card/backplane they are plugged into. The scsi card has no way to change the scsi id on any drive. There are enterprise level SCA boards that can change scsi ID's but thats far outside the scope of the issue here.

teh_Foxx0rz wrote on 2023-11-06, 17:50:

I suppose I could try "Force SE".

Try this first.

luckybob wrote on 2023-11-06, 18:37:

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-11-06, 18:31:

Yeah I dont know what dock youre talking about but it wouldnt matter what the ID selector is set to. SCA is designed to get its […]
Show full quote

teh_Foxx0rz wrote on 2023-11-06, 17:50:

The drive caddies do have an ID selector dial on their rear, which as mentioned, I've set to 0. And yeah, that first option is w […]
Show full quote

The drive caddies do have an ID selector dial on their rear, which as mentioned, I've set to 0.
And yeah, that first option is what I've done with the cabling.
I suppose I could try "Force SE".

There's no termination options in the SCSI BIOS, but I can set the SCSI Controller ID in there, which is set to 7.

Though, would it be simpler to just get myself a wide, LVD SCSI controller with the right cable to connect directly to this caddy, rather than fuss around with figuring out that other thread and testing pin continuity and soldering for this DIFFSENSE pin?

Yeah I dont know what dock youre talking about but it wouldnt matter what the ID selector is set to.
SCA is designed to get its ID from the controller. You dont have to set anything on the drive if youre using it properly, as designed.
Right now youre not trying to do that, so you have to do something different.

The Selector on the back of a SCSI dock could be used, but the selector is in 3 parts, if will have a selector of some kind on the outside of the case, a cable and a block on the end that should go into the jumper pins that set the SCSI ID.
If that isnt where that block is, on the jumper pins on the drive then it will never work. The only SCSI cable that can set the device ID is an SCA cable, and you are trying to use an SCA to 50pin adapter so its impossible for that to work because the signals wont carry through to the controller card.

If you set your SCSI setup like I told you to it will work.
If you try what I told you in the last part of my post it might work.
If you carry on trying to set the ID like you are then it wont work.

Your call.

you are incorrect. The issue is that selector. please change it to anything other than zero. I recommend 1. SCA scsi drives DO have SCSI ID "jumpers", they are set by the card/backplane they are plugged into. The scsi card has no way to change the scsi id on any drive. There are enterprise level SCA boards that can change scsi ID's but thats far outside the scope of the issue here.

No Im not incorrect.
I did say the problem is the SCSI ID isnt selected. It can be 0-6.
SCA drives IDs are set over the 80pin connector. I know because I have a setup that does exactly that.

The ID selector on the dock he is using can only work if it is plugged into the device ID jumpers on the bottom of the drive.

Not only that but I doubt the jumper block on the selector will fit, because of the size of the jumper pins on the drive, and they have to be keyed the same so a 0 on the display is the same as 0 on the drive. Which is seriously doubt.

ElectroSoldier, what you're saying doesn't seem applicable to my caddy and dock, at least. I don't see "three parts", I only see a single dial I can change, on the actual caddy that holds the hard drive itself. And there are no accommodations to connect this dial to the jumpers on the bottom of the drive; it doesn't look like that's how it was designed in any way. The jumpers on the bottom of the drive are likely just a backup so it can be used outside of a caddy or something.

Also, I tried setting the SCSI ID of this drive/caddy to 1, but now it has the same issue, only as "LUN:1-0" this time. Hmm.

Ok.
Is that selector on the inside of the outside?
What is the big grey connector?

The selector and big grey connector is on the caddy which holds the hard drive, and slides into the dock (the rear of which is in the second picture). The big grey connector is just the interconnect between the caddy and the dock, and not in itself important.

I thought so.

Ok.
Your idea is right, in that the ID selector dial can set the ID, but its not connected to anything on the drive that can select an ID.
So the ID selector is setting the ID of the caddy and that is presenting itself to the controller card as IDo or ID1. But the drive itself doesnt have an ID selected.

That drive has 2 ways, and 2 ways only of getting an ID, the first isnt an option to you because you dont have an SCA backplane, the other way is to set the ID on the pins.
If you use an SCA to 50/68pin adapter it will use the SCA backplane method of setting the ID. Which is the best way.

You can jury rig it by setting that dial to ID1 and the get a jumper block on the 3rd set of pins from the right of the block when viewed as it is on that photo of the bottom of the drive. This will set the drives ID to ID1 too.
If you dont have the proper jumper then you can use a bit of fuse wire wrapped around the 2 pins.

One thing I will say is this.
I dont know that caddy, I dont know if it counts as a SCSI device in its own right, or if the drives ID has to match the ID selected on the caddy.
I would try and match them first, if that doesnt work then set the caddy to ID0, the drive to ID1 and see what happens.

There is a 3rd option in that the caddy is a device and the drives are LUNs...
But thats a whole new problem.

Disruptor wrote on 2023-11-06, 18:39:

teh_Foxx0rz wrote on 2023-11-06, 17:50:

I suppose I could try "Force SE".

Try this first.

Agreed.

the SCSI ID bits are always selecting an ID, whether they are jumpered or not. having a dial or jumpers there is of no importance here.

the fact that the controller gets stuck at LUN1 when the ID is set to 1 makes me think it might be high byte termination issue, causing the drive to think it is on a wide bus, when in fact it is only on a narrow bus.

Mm, that makes the most sense to me from what I'm managing to understand here. As the terminator I have would only be terminating the narrow bus, not the entirety of what the drive is looking for. And I also can't see why there'd be a selector built in that doesn't do anything when used with a drive that the caddy is clearly designed to work with.

I tried "Force SE" and was getting exactly the same issues. And also, the number that it gets stuck on when trying to boot corresponds to the ID set for the boot drive in the BIOS, not the ID selected on the drive caddy, just for the record.

What connector is on the inside of the caddy?

I was assuming you were using the 80pin to 50pin adapter you pictured but you cant be.
Your caddy has the correct connector for the drive doesnt it? it has an 80pin SCA connector on it... Right?

I mean something plugs into that drive itself.
What does that look like?

The adapter from eBay is a 50-pin to 68-pin. The bay for the caddy has a 68-pin connector on the back, as shown in that photo in my previous post. The drive and caddy have a single long connector which looks like it must be this 80-pin SCA connector.

Ok.
You need an active terminator on the bus not a passive one. Even if it is being forced to SE mode it will still need an active terminator on the bus to terminate the voltage etc.

You need a 68pin cable with enough drops for the amount of devices you have plus 2, one for the SCSI card one end the other needs a terminator.
You then need an adapter that turns the 50pin connector on your controller card into a 68pin one.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/314765800582?hash= … ABk9SR_ynkuL0Yg

Then it might! work.

That caddy is a single disk SCA backplane in its own right. And the SCSI ID selector is selecting the ID of the disk, there is no need to touch the jumper pins on the bottom of the drive.

My fault, I should have asked what it actually looks like in the first place.
Im not really sure if it will work because you have an SCA backplane on a 50 pin SE connector on the controller card...

Get an LVD & SE controller card, you will get a much better experience and it will be cheaper and easier in the long run

Im not sure if this will actually work because you have an SCA backplane on a 50pin SE connector on your controller card.
Thats something Ive never actually tried before, not that way around.