Adding a 3rd Hard Drive to a Dell Precision 650 Workstation

**Spaceman Spiff** · April 9th, 2008, 08:19 PM

One of my old 37GB Seagate Cheetah SCSI drives died last week in my system. It was one of two drives in my system.

I finally got a replacement...two replacements, actually...identical Fujitsu MBA3147NP 147GB U320 SCSI drives...one to replace the dead Cheetah, and a second as a dedicated back-up drive.

When I plug either drive into the system, the system boots normally, the LSI Logic SCSI Adapter scans for the drives, and everything starts perfectly. When I add the third drive into the system, it gives a "device not found" error during initialization, and neither drive is seen. What could I be doing wrong? I can't think of what to do next.

BTW, the LSI Logic controller's software is set to disable RAID functionality (it was orignally set as enabled). That didn't change anything. It still doesn't work.

Help!

**Platypus** · April 9th, 2008, 09:18 PM

Could it be a termination issue? I don't really have anything to do with SCSI, but I assume U320 still wants the last device to terminate the bus, so if two drives have termination switched in... ??

**Spaceman Spiff** · April 9th, 2008, 10:53 PM

I don't think that's the problem.

To reinterate, when either new drive is plugged into the data cable (no jumpers are set on either drive), the system sees each correctly (the original "brother" to the dead drive is still the "C" drive in both cases). When both drives are plugged into the data cable (along with the original "C" drive"), neither are seen.

**Spaceman Spiff** · April 9th, 2008, 11:42 PM

OK, mark me up as "stupid" again. The drives were OEM from ZipZoomFly (NewEgg was out; so was ZipZoomFly, but I only found that out after they took my money and processed it to the point of no cancellation); but I digress. I went online, found the manual, and found the jumper settings. They work now.

Dang I'm dense! When all else fails, read the manual...