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Is there a BIOS hard drive size limit on the Apollo 9000/700 series workstations?

jmetal88

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I have to ask because I was trying to put a new drive in my 720 using one of those 80-to-50-pin adapters. The drive is about 36GB, and I did previously have it working in my Atari Mega STe using the same adapter (although it was hard to find a driver that would work with it), but it won't work with my 720. Here's what happens: If I match the address that the old drive was installed at, the machine won't detect any SCSI drives attached. This address would have been first in the boot order (can't remember whether that was 6 or 7 right now as I've already taken the drive back out). If I set the address to one late in the boot order (close to 1 or 0 if I remember correctly), the floppy and CD drives will be detected, but the hard drive still won't be. However if I boot up an HP-UX installation CD, the installation CD seems to see the drive just fine, and appears to format and install to it. However, after installation, the BIOS still doesn't seem to be able to recognize the drive or boot from it.

I'd try to look for a bigger 50-pin drive to put in it, but honestly, they don't get much bigger than the original drive before they move on to the 68-pin connectors. So essentially what I need to figure out is, how new/large can I get with a SCSI hard drive and an adapter before it won't work with this machine?

ALTERNATIVELY, since I do have a SCSI floppy drive in this machine, does anyone know if I'd be able to set up a boot disk fairly easily with HP-UX that could try to hand things off to the OS on the hard drive after it's started to load?
 
I take it since my post has been up this long now with no responses that nobody knows? That's disappointing. I guess I'll look into either a larger 50-pin drive or possibly one of those SD-to-SCSI converters I've ran across recently.
 
I don't have a lot experience with this OS, but you should be okay. I don't have good experience using those adapters, they seem to not be very reliable. I would probably try and find a larger 50pin drive of use a solid state device. I would recommend waiting a little little bit on the SCSI2SD adapter, there is a newer version coming out soon that is fast. The SCSI2SD isn't very fast, it's about as fast as a standard 5200rpm SCSI in the current iteration. The new version is a little more expensive than the current version but should get closer to ADATA and the likes SCSI to CF/SATA adapter which are faster yet but much more expensive. I may eventually upgrade to SCSI to CF adapter and the block partition of the SCSI2SD card isn't as useful to me. If you want multiple OS on a single SD card I might recommending holding out for new SCSI2SD adapter. Otherwise I would keep a eye out for larger capacity 50pin physical drive as these can likely be found cheaper than an SCSI to CD/IDE/SATA adapter plus drive.
 
It may just be something about the specific drive. I have some HP Dsomethingorother 1 GB SCSI drives that won't boot a 715. But the same drive model, just with the Seagate part number (ST31200N), works fine. I think the D-something part number suggests it was meant for an HP NetServer, but even still I can't imagine why it ought to matter. And yet... it does.
 
Did you make sure that the bus is terminated at the end? I often forget that too and most SCA adapters and hdds do not support this, because these hdds are meant for backplanes.
 
Did you make sure that the bus is terminated at the end? I often forget that too and most SCA adapters and hdds do not support this, because these hdds are meant for backplanes.

I set the 'TPR' jumper on the converter because I thought that would terminate it... Maybe it doesn't? I never saw if there was any kind of termination built in to the original drive, but there was nothing external installed for termination originally.
 
Tpr usually mean to supply active termination power (5v) to the SCSI bus.
Setting this can kill a sparcstation or the attached drive. I accidently killed a 36gb drive this way myself.
Also adapter can confuse hardware detection. For example on a sun system at the firmware you probe the scsi hard drive you get a duplicate entry with a page clear. How the system is still able to figure out that this one drive in most instances and install without much fuss. Then I also have SCA80 drives that still have additional jumpers on them to further confuse the issue/system.

You can find simple 50pin 68pin adapters, these are usually the wrong gender so you need a gender changer and/or an external to internal adapter/ribbon cable.

Now back to HP/UX, which version are you trying to install? I am assuming 10 or newer.
I used to work for and with Agilent but my exposure to this OS is purely in passing.
As I recall the older systems, not sure about this one, had a spot on the internal ribbon cable where on could have a terminator. Not sure it this was active or passive, but I believe it was a passive terminator. I don't believe there was any disk size limitations but it also really wasn't considered until later OSes. Earlier versions that were more BSD like may have had the limitation that boot partition had to be a set size. SunOS had this limitation at one point of 512mb than 1gb as the largest boot partition, but I guessing you are running a new enough version that this isn't an issue.
 
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Tpr usually mean to supply active termination power (5v) to the SCSI bus.
Setting this can kill a sparcstation or the attached drive. I accidently killed a 36gb drive this way myself.
Also adapter can confuse hardware detection. For example on a sun system at the firmware you probe the scsi hard drive you get a duplicate entry with a page clear. How the system is still able to figure out that this one drive in most instances and install without much fuss. Then I also have SCA80 drives that still have additional jumpers on them to further confuse the issue/system.

You can find simple 50pin 68pin adapters, these are usually the wrong gender so you need a gender changer and/or an external to internal adapter/ribbon cable.

Now back to HP/UX, which version are you trying to install? I am assuming 10 or newer.
I used to work for and with Agilent but my exposure to this OS is purely in passing.
As I recall the older systems, not sure about this one, had a spot on the internal ribbon cable where on could have a terminator. Not sure it this was active or passive, but I believe it was a passive terminator. I don't believe there was any disk size limitations but it also really wasn't considered until later OSes. Earlier versions that were more BSD like may have had the limitation that boot partition had to be a set size. SunOS had this limitation at one point of 512mb than 1gb as the largest boot partition, but I guessing you are running a new enough version that this isn't an issue.

No, my HP-UX is an older release. 9.02 or something like that, I think (I'd have to check). But the installer partitions the drive on its own, so if it's messing up the boot partition size when I run it, I'm not sure what I can do. That still doesn't explain why the machine can't see the other drives (4 and 5) when I have the address set to 6 or 7, though.
 
I was under the impression the the Apollo used similar system as the Sun Sparcstations. In which there are two drive bays one and zero, which correspond normally to a specific device location.

So on Sun systems drive 1 is intended to be default to your primary drive set at internal SCSI ID 3, the second drive (Drive 0) set at SCSI ID 1. These are logic aliases to the specific hardware address store in the the boot PROM.

On most narrow SCSI systems the SCSI controller is set to 7, so setting you ID is to 0 or 7(narrow)/13 (wide) isn't ideal. In an not sure why 6 is causing issues though, on Sun system this is usually expected to by the default location for CD-ROM drives.

I believe HP-UX 9 came out around the time the apollo 900 did and still also used some BSD conventions.

Hopefully one of the actual HP-UX users will chime in. I know there are some on this forum but the *nix section is one of the quieter ones.
 
I've rarely touched HP-UX but under Irix before XFS came around you could not boot from drives where the main partition was bigger than 4gb. Macs famously before the 68040 (or it might of been the 601 PowerPC chip) couldn't boot from drives where the main partition was bigger than 2gb. You could usually get around using absurdly large disks by spanning the machine over several partitions on the drive. Try partitioning your root filesystem to 1 or 2gb, then allocate the rest to /usr or something.

I don't have good experience using those adapters, they seem to not be very reliable.
If you don't handle them like a gorilla you're fine. They do not like being flexed up/down, side/side. Plug the drive straight in and don't let them flex.
 
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Well, I put this aside for a while because I moved, but I'm starting to get things set back up again, so I just ordered a SCSI terminator that I hope will help out. I'll have to look into the partition size issue and figure out if there's a way to do a custom setup at all (HP-UX seems to pick the setup it thinks will work best automatically and since I haven't gone through the setup in a while I can't remember if it has a way to set up the partitions manually).
 
... I did previously have it working in my Atari Mega STe using the same adapter (although it was hard to find a driver that would work with it)...

Not clear why a driver was required? Surely the conversion is invisible.

You should be able to set all partition sizes in the HPUX install. Stating the obvious, I think it would be a lot less complicated to procure a suitable 50-pin SCSI 2 or 3 drive, 1 GB to 4 GB.

Good luck with it!
 
Not clear why a driver was required? Surely the conversion is invisible.

You should be able to set all partition sizes in the HPUX install. Stating the obvious, I think it would be a lot less complicated to procure a suitable 50-pin SCSI 2 or 3 drive, 1 GB to 4 GB.

Good luck with it!

The MegaSTE needs a driver installed on the hard drive before it can access the partitions. Not just for this hard drive, but for any hard drive. For some reason, the first two drivers I tried didn't work with this drive (they wouldn't even partition it), but the third one did.
 
I might also suggest joining the Sun rescue mail list there are several HP/UX user on the list and they are usually pretty helpful as well
 
Try as I might, I CANNOT seem to find a way to set the root partition size during the HP-UX installation. Do I need to add a non-root partition before I can adjust the size?

EDIT: I'll add that it does seem to "see" the hard drive as a 2GB drive, though, so maybe that should be my size limit if I go for another drive?
 
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Yeah, I think I just need to get a new drive at this point. I wonder if I should try a 4GB or just stick to a 2GB?
 
I have a IBM 4GB drive on my 735, a 1" high type. Although a 1 or 2 GB half-height is period-accurate for these machines, I did notice a big improvement in speed with the newer drive. 1 GB is a bit tight on space, 2 GB is enough, 4GB luxurious.
Also HPUX 10.20 might be a better choice, if you can locate media, or try NextSTEP 3.3 RISC, which is easily found on the 'net.
 
I have a IBM 4GB drive on my 735, a 1" high type. Although a 1 or 2 GB half-height is period-accurate for these machines, I did notice a big improvement in speed with the newer drive. 1 GB is a bit tight on space, 2 GB is enough, 4GB luxurious.
Also HPUX 10.20 might be a better choice, if you can locate media, or try NextSTEP 3.3 RISC, which is easily found on the 'net.

I've looked into NextSTEP. It doesn't run on the 720 or 730 even though it does run on the later 700-series machines (the CPU in the 720/730 is apparently too early a revision to support it). I believe it is actually possible to replace the system and CPU board on the 720/730 with boards from a 735 if I ever decided I really wanted to go that route, but with the eBay prices I've seen so far, that will cost me at least an additional $150.

There are some BSD variants I was looking into that will run on the 720/730, though, but I need to get a larger hard drive running first (I think the one it came with was on the order of 400 MB or something like that, and the BSD variants I tried just wouldn't install due to lack of space).
 
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