How to get computer to "see" a SCSI external hard drive.

Questions to consider:
1. Has the drive ever worked with a Mac. If yes,
2. Is the drive properly terminated?
3. What is the SCSI id of the drive? If there is only one scsi device attached to the card, the id should not matter, but it is best to set it to zero.
4. Do you know the SCSI cable works?
By the way, do you hear the drive spinning?

Why not try reinstalling a driver? I found this one, that I think is worth a try:
http://download.driverguide.com/driver/AdaptecPowerDomain
29160%2C PowerDomain+29160N%2C+PowerDomain+2930%2C
PowerDomain 2940U2W%2C+PowerDomain+2940UW%2C
PowerDomain 2940W%2C+PowerDomain+SlimSCSI1480/Adaptec/d157002.html
You should cut and paste the link, removing the extra spaces I inserted a space at the end of each line.

Hi 2-character,

I just went thru this issue w/my MDD G4 running backup software Restrospect via an Adaptec PowerDomain 29160. The Adaptec card worked fine under 10.2 and 10.3, but would NOT work reliably under 10.4.x. Turns out Adaptec dropped support for the 29xxx (and 39xxx) lines of SCSI cards for the Mac since Panther came out. Posters over on the Restropect forum said my getting the 29160 to work at all under Panther was lucky. I would now agree.

So, depending on what devices are on the SCSI bus (HDs versus tape drives, other devices) you "may" also have difficulty getting the Adaptec cards to work under Tiger.

An alternative is the ATTO SCSI cards. You can buy new, or used on eBay. Just make sure you have upgraded the OSX to 10.4.11 and gone to at least Java Release 5 via SoftwareUpdate. Then install the ATTO driver before you install the card. I got kernel panics until I did the Java upgrades via SoftwareUpdate since I was getting JVM (Java Virtual Machine) errors in system.log .


Good luck!


Ed

That's very interesting Ed, because I have 29160N that is working fine with OS 10.5. I did download a driver for it. The sticker on the card says "APD-29160N MAC. Perhaps it is the "N" that makes the difference?

Hi

Yes, I suspect that the Adaptec drivers for the 29160 and 29160N haven't been re-written for 10.4 or 10.5. When I upgraded to Tiger (10.4.11) on my MDD G4 1.25GHz DP, the Retrospect software would not run at all until I upgraded Retrospect to 6.1.230 from 5.x. Then the backups would run for a time, then freeze up. I'd have to ForceQuit Retrospect. I did no upgrades to the drivers for the Adaptec card. Since the backups would run until a new DDS-3 tape was needed (about 12-14Gb written to the first tape in the backup set), I suspect Retrospect would signal , via communication w/the HP DAT tape drive on the SCSI chain, that a new tape was needed, but due to changes in the headers/structures in Darwin under Tiger, the app would fail and freeze up. If I could get a copy of the APD driver source code, and enough time!, I could probably fix it.

I went the route of getting an ATTO card and all is now well again in backupland.

Here is the KB article from EMC/Dantz on the Adaptec and ATTO cards and Tiger.

As for the "N", I think the hardware difference is the number and type of internal and external SCSI adapters. APD29160 has a single 68-pin LVD SCSI adapter externally, while the APD29160N has a 50-pin SCSI adapter. The number of internal SCSI adapters is also different for the two cards.


Ed

I did some digging on the Adaptec website and found the source code the 29160, 29160N and 39160 cards in the Ultra160 family. Here is the link to the source code for the drivers under Linux 2.6.

Ed