From: Chris Robinson 

Hmmm - SCSI cable no.4 seems to have worked (had to reinstall NT though,
otherwise I got a BSOD when I tried to boot).

So it does appear to have been a cable problem after all.  But how are you
supposed to be able to tell this because formats/ integrity checks all
worked OK - I'd've thought that if the wrong cable was in, the HDD would've
been inaccessible?  Are there any good SCSI utilities out there that you
know of that'll help check for this kind of thing or is it just a case of
trying umpteen cables 'til you get the right one?

Sory to have wasted anyones time :o

Chris.

Chris Robinson wrote:

> Hello again,
>
> I recently replaced two old(ish) HP workstations with two new ones.
> This all went well (after some teething problems relating to Graphics
> card drivers) but now I've come to sort out the one's I replaced (clean
> them up/ redistribute them).  They both run NT4 SP6a and have SCSI Hard
> Drives.  A dodgy SCSI cable in another PC ment I had to remove the SCSI
> cable from one of these PC's temporarily so's I could get another PC up
> and running.  I've now replaced the SCSI cable in the old HP and NT now
> bluescreens on boot up* (I've tried 2 other different SCSI cables and
> get the same result - all these cables work in the PC I had to
> temporarily swap them into).  Here's what I've tried already (n.b.  It's
> worth mentioning that I'm trying this on two identical HP Kayak XW
> Workstations - I've tried everything below on BOTH of the PC's):
>
> - When I boot the PC I get the option to run SCSI disk utilities - I've
> tried verifying the Hard Drive (this works fine).
>
> - I thought I'd try an NT repair - I don't have an ERD but it finds the
> installation no porblems.  NT then says it's made changes to the disk
> that require me to restart and re-run the repair process (no porbs
> thinks me, I've seen this before) but I reboot and re-run the repair and
> I get the same message - I'm stuck in an eternal loop here.
>
> - I then thought I might aswell try to reinstall NT from scratch.  I
> boot to the NT CD, select to format in NTFS (this goes OK).  NT then
> starts to copy files.  It goes fine but it fails to copy some files
> (always the same files - NTOSKRNL.EXE, NTFS.SYS) - is this because these
> reside on a particular part of the disk?.
>
> * There is one of the cables that I get:
>     "TRAP 0000000E ====== PAGE FAULT =======
>     ** At liniar address 00000000"
>  This isn't an NT BSOD though - it's just a regular Black screen before
> NT even loads.
>
> I completely confused - my knowledge of SCSI is far from vast and my
> experience with it so far has had me wanting to break things ;o)  The
> thing I find odd about it is that a cable could be screwed but could
> still work... a bit - that's the nice thing about IDE - if it doesn't
> work, it doesn't work...
>
> Appologies for making you all read this mini-novel of a post ;o)
>
> Chris.

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