E-mu Emulator Sampler User Forum for the EIII EII EI and EIII XP

Got a new problem with the EIII.

Whenever I try to access the internal disk, I get a SCSI HARDWARE ERROR flashing.
I changed the internal cable- still the same.
I swapped out various drives that I KNOW are good- still the same.
The drives all spin up no problem.

Any ideas?

UPDATE: I can get into diagnostics, and the drive is recognized and all the tests run and pass. WTF.

Look at the second board, on the front (its just along the front edge, there is a circuit called "NCR5380".
Take it off and put it back. This is to clean the circuit socket.

If there is any external disk, take it away.

If you can stabilize you machine (I mean it stops blinking that crappy message) just try to save a blanck bank on the disk. It will correct the directory.

Do you have the same message if you start your machine with a diskette ?

No, the EIII boots fine with the floppy, it's only when I try to do anything with the internal hard disk. I get that same message if I try to copy software, format or save anything to it. I will try that circuit. Is it on the second board down? The one with the SCSI cables attached to the front?

Exactly. Its a big circuit, a 40 pin

No luck. I have the feeling it is going to be tough to get this fixed. My knowledge is limited and parts are non existent :'(. Anyone need a parts unit?

is the psu calibrated? there is a pot on the power supply that is used to calibrate it.

Is there a thread for that procedure?
Thanks, J

I doubt very deeply, but we never know.

Measure the voltage between the card cage and a +5 on an integrated circuit (pin 14 or 16)

The voltage adjustment is on the power supply.

I will send pictures tomorrow with a complete method.

So I removed the chip that the good doctor said to do and it went back in ok.
Now it won't recognize any drive of any kind on the SCSI bus. It must see that there is a drive on the bus because it will not boot without one connected. All the drives I have tried spin up fine- the EIII just will not detect them. I am thinking that the SCSI controller circuit is toast.  :'(
If anyone has any suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated.

Jay

If the circuit was toasted, it wouldn't see the internal disk.
Look if there is not a bent pin when you have put the circuit back in place. If you don't think so, just do it, even if you are sure. You would be surprised of how many times it happened to me.

Check the flat cable as well, please, sse in there is not a burned pin, especially pin 26.

I checked the pins on that IC and they are all ok and seated nicely. I have also tried changing the scsi cable (a few times now). Still no joy.
Jay

What disk is it (brand, type)
Can you test another one ?

Do you get the error message if you type the buttons like "Master", "Sample", Edit" (whatever)....

Can you copy the software to a diskette ?

Please read my previous posts.
I have tried all kinds of compatible disks including the original functional quantum one. I have tried different cables. The sampler works just fine in every way except when I try to do anything related to SCSI.
No drives work of any kind. They all spin up. The SCSI bus will not detect any drive of any any kind.
The thing boots up fine from floppy and I can access all modules.
JUST NO SCSI ???

THIS IS CLEAR !!!! JUST NO SCSI !!!!!

Its the NCR5380, 99% of probability.

I posted : "If the circuit was toasted, it wouldn't see the internal disk."

Didi you check if :

a) - Wire 26 of the SCSI Cables (especially the one going to the external SCSI is not burned, or brown,
b) - The SCSI cable is not inverted
c) - No pins to where the SCSI cable go on the processor board are bent or damaged

Is the +5V a real +5V (+-0,1V  ON THE DISK POWER CONNECTOR)

If the voltage is low, check the +5V on the boards. If the voltage is NOT low on the boards, do not adjust the PSU, obviously !

Hi Doc, I checked all those things and all seems cool. Where am I going to find a new controller chip?
Jay

Did you try the hard disk somewhere else, on a computer ?

Does this disk have the terminator resistors installed ?

Are the terminator and PWRTERM jumpers correctly setted ?

In cas of doubt, send me a picture of the controler board, or the exact reference of the disk so I can dig the tech note somewhere. Even better, if you have it, just send it here.

You should see on the HD controler board, near the middle of the data connector, a FUSE, generallly named "F1" wich is 1 amp.

Put the power on and measure the voltage at the edges of this fuse. Its a very commun failure on hard disks. If you read 5 V, it means that the fuse is CUT, therefore, the disk cannot work.
What you can do then is to solder another fuse, but don't do anything right now, if the fuse is bad, send me a picture for the controler card, I will show you how to fix it.

Tried 6 different drives. I know they are all good working drives. They work in everything else.
Cables are all ok.

There is a thread, recent, ON THIS FORUM, where there is an adress where you can buy E-Mu parts and certainly NCR5380s.

Yo Doc, should the NCR5380 IC be warm or slightly hot to the touch? Mine is.
Also, I am having trouble tracking one down. No one seems to be willing to sell me just one. Lots of company's sell them, but only orders of 2-3 hundred at a time. I think some old SCSI cards used them, so maybe that would be easier?
Do you have any?

Nope, I never had any HOT one, even warm.
Can yopu make a picture of your machine with rthe cover up, but alla the cards and cables in place, just like if you were bout to close it. I have an doubt...

So, it's not the NCR5380 chip either. It's not the SCSI cable, and it is not the software.
Just no damn internal SCSI, but it boots fine with the floppy. ???
I really do not have any more ideas as to what to try next.
Anyone?????

In the "Special" menu, you can decide wich is the processor board SCSI ID. Generally, its OK to put it to 6. The internal disk should be on 1.
This allows to EVENTUALLY connect a Mac wich has its processor board to SCSI ID#7, the CD Rom at 3, the internal disk at 0. This avoids any conflict on the SCSI chain.

Please check at least that your processor board has not the same SCS ID number than the disk.

Wich are the brands and models of the disks ? I will check their jumper config (termpwr, etc...)

Where are you located ?

Doc, I am ready to ship the fucking thing to you to see if you can do anything with it.
I am in Canada.
Today, I got the original drive working again, but it will not see any other drive including the C/F drive which started all of this bullshit.
I did nothing different than before, it just decided to detect the drive for unknown reasons.
Anyway, let me know if I can send it to you to look at or not.
Otherwise, I am going to put it up for sale with the original drive installed.

Thanks, Jay

What do you mean by "C/F drive wich STARTED all of this bullshit" ?

Forget it, I am in France. PLEASE, send me the references of the drives. I am doing my best to help you, you know?

Cheers

I am not an amateur when it comes to E-mu samplers. I have tried EVERYTHING possible. The C|F drive is not compatible with this unit. I even bought the cards with the pink triangle on them. It SOMETIMES detects the drive, but NEVER completes the verification process. I have even left it overnight.
I have finally got the original 80 meg drive to mount up, format and take the software, and that is how I am going to leave it.
I am not implying that no-one is not trying to help me with this unit, but I have tried everything that has been suggested to no avail.
So, I am going to get rid of the unit. It will make someone very happy. It is in MINT condition and I have replaced the floppy and backlight. It is an 8 Meg unit, and functions fine- it just WILL NOT take the C/F drive.
No disrespect to anyone, and I really do appreciate the input from everyone.

Jay

I can't believe it... I've been reading everywhere and I didn't see there was a peroblem with CF drive, wich still I don't know what this can be !

I understand now its a memory card apparently ?

I tought you were talking about DIVES as HARD DISKS !!!!

Do you mean you have installed the SCSI<>IDE card with the memory card, and it doesn't work ?

I may be interrested by your memory card and converter.

As far as I have come to understand, the most critical part is the CF card it self when you try to replace the SCSI drive with it. Forget new cf cards since they are way to fast for older SCSI systems.
What I can recommend is SanDisk cards - the older ones which are red and blue.
When i first tried the CF solution I managed to make it work with TwinMOS cards but others had problem with that brand. I have an old Amiga computer and the problem is the same when I try to replace the drive with a cf card, newer cards doesn't work and some brands that work for some people on their gears doesn't mean it will necessary work on yours! It's wierd I know, but that's the way it is I guess... Again, try SanDisk cf cards the older ones. You can find those on eBay.
If it doesn't work, come back here again and we will make it work!

Good Luck!

//Escobar

Thanks Dr.C!  Your fix worked for me.

Hi All and a Happy New Year.
I have the same issue wih my EIII (v2.42 and v2 Firmware) except it won't see the attached SCSI CDRom drive (with a Factory Disk inside).
When I go to load from from the CD Rom drive (It's shown in the list) it kicks up repeatedly one of three error messages -
"SCSI Hardware Error" or
"Not an EII Disk" or
"Disk not Formatted"
It used to read the Factory Library disks fine until recently. I have tested the CDRom on another system and it works fine. I have changed SCSI cables and they check out OK. All terminated correctly. It see's the Internal HD and Floppy OK. Problem only seems to be in the external SCSI chain connection.
Any thoughts welcomed.
Thanks
 

Hi,

I'm not sure in case of the EIII, but if it is like the EMAX II, it has only one SCSI Bus.
If it is so, you don't have to terminate your CD drive because you already terminated the internal hard drive.

Hi Shogun, it really sounds like the EIII doesn't like that particular drive for some reason. The more I fix up/upgrade Emax's, EIII's, EII's and now an EIIIXS, the more I see really weird things come out of nowhere. Especially SCSI stuff.
I just got into upgrading an EIIIXS for the first serious time, and what a nightmare so far. I have never been successful in getting one of them in a stable working state.
To give you an idea of what its done to me so far (SCSI wise), and what I have tried, read on...

Unit started off with a failing PSU, dead HD and bad display.

Installed OLED display. Issue fixed.
Replaced PSU. Issue fixed.

Installed Acard SCSI/IDE bridge with CF adapter. Machine ID 5, SCSI ID 4, CDROM drive ID 3. It booted the system and worked fine for an entire afternoon of saving/recalling banks. I initially used a Kingston 1GB card as we do with the original EIII mod. Interestingly, this card was the only one out of the 4 or 5 I tested on the setup that showed up on the machines's drive menu as 'Cf Card 1GB'. Any others, regardless of size or brand showed up simply as 'D4' (SCSI ID is 4 on the Acard). Initially, all tested cards were formatted with the default interleave, which for the EIIIX is 3 if I recall.

Problems started showing up when running the backup utility in Disk Management/Backup. I had an Apple CD300 CDROM drive hooked up, set the backup to ALL/AUTOMATIC/EMPTY BANKS and let it go to it. So I was wanting to copy the entire contents of an EIIIX CDROM library to the internal CF drive.

I watched it read and write until it got to around the tenth or so bank transfer, and then it displayed a 'SCSI Hardware Error'. I restarted and ran it again. This time it failed with the same error after around 6 banks transferred.
At this point, I changed CF cards. I tried a different model of 1GB Kingston, the one with the lizard or whatever on the front. Formatted it, saved blank bank, installed SW etc etc, and ran the same backup again. It failed with the same error again but at a different point, bank 14 or something.

So after seeing that, I figured I had a hardware issue. I have spares lying around, so I changed the SCSI bridge first and ran the backup again with similar failure results. Next I changed the card reader. Same thing again.
Then I changed the internal SCSI ribbon cable. Same results. At this point, I tried a different CDROM library disk just incase and that made no difference. Taking it a step up, I tried a different CDROM drive and SCSI cable with no effect on the resulting hardware error. Getting really pissed off, I changed the SCSI controller IC. No change.

Just FYI, the CDROM drive supplied its own TERM power, so I tried putting a terminator block on it. No change again.
Every now and again, I got a 'SCSI MEDIA ERROR' instead, just to keep me coming back for more I reckon.

The Acard bridge was set to be terminated and supply its own TERM power. I tried turning off TERM power on the Acard and enabled internal TERM power on the EIIIX while keeping the Acard terminated, just not supplying its own TERM power. NO CHANGE.

Now I tried a whole bunch of format interleave settings on various cards and kept running the backups. Same string of random failures.

The thing that really gets me on this whole thing is that there is no commonality to when the backup process quits. If it quit at the same point every time, it wouldn't be as frustrating.

Is it entirely possible that the CF solution is just not 100% compatible with the 3X machines for some reason? I would say so. I don't think it's any kind of SCSI termination or ID conflict, and all of that different hardware can't all be defective and produce the same failures.

Sorry if this was off on too much of a tangent, but it might give you a few things to try or keep in mind. :)

Jay


Jan 10 update:
A generic 256mb card resolved all of the errors. Anything above would not work for this machine.