I am having some weird, weird SCSI I/O errors. I'm running Debian/PowerPC on an "Old World" (beige) Mac-- namely, a Power Mac 7300/180 (the 7300s were sold overseas, and are uncommon in the USA; they are roughly on par with the 7500s, I believe.. if not a bit higher-end) with a G3/220 CPU upgrade.
The system has worked fine for a long while. However, when I tried to install some more SCSI drives into it (KNOWN WORKING drives), I get some curious I/O errors which prevent me from using the system. The system only seems to work properly when I use it with ONE hard drive. When I add more, I get these problems. The poop: * First hard drive is a 1GB Quantum * Second hard drive is a 4GB something-or-other * Third hard drive is one of those big old "boat anchor"/"freight train" 4GB drives. It fills the whole bottom bay of the Mac (twice as high as a typical "modern" hard drive). It's at the end of the SCSI chain, so I enabled the terminator on it. That is the only termination on the chain, as far as I know. The information on this drive and the (many) jumper options availble on it (nice drive!) is at: http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/scsi/st15150n.html (yes, it's a Seagate Barracuda ST15150N). The problem seems to happen whenever I'm working (reading/writing) on the second or third drive. I get I/O errors, and kernelspam like this: Dec 27 19:36:35 fortitude kernel: EXT2-fs error (device sd(8,34)): ext2_free_blocks: Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 3717479526, count = 1 Dec 27 19:36:35 fortitude kernel: Remounting filesystem read-only Dec 27 19:36:35 fortitude kernel: EXT2-fs error (device sd(8,34)): ext2_free_blocks: Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 620094437, count = 1 Dec 27 19:36:35 fortitude kernel: Remounting filesystem read-only cks: Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 2460472751, count = 1 cks: Freeing blocks not in datazone - block = 1739398958, count = 1 For instance, whenever I try to mkisofs from a directory tree, after some given percentage (it will get maybe 1/3 to 1/2 the way through a disc) it will say "mkisofs: Input/output error. cannot read from (FILENAME)", and then the drive begins going "click, click, click, click, click, click, click," slowly and rhythmically (around 1.5-2 times a second, I'd say). At this point, the machine is essentially unusable, since the whole SCSI bus seems out of whack; even trying to do an ls on a directory on the FIRST drive screws up. Like this: fortitude:/home/shared/cds/cosmo# cd /var/log fortitude:/var/log# ls -l (SYSTEM JUST SITS THERE, RHYTMICALLY CLICKING AWAY) The kernel I use is 2.4.20; I compiled it myself. Other than this bug, it works perfectly. Please, could someone help me? Is this a termination issue? Is this a known bug? What in heck is wrong with my Mac? --Jessica -- J e s s i c a L e a h B l a n k
