SCO

Presumably this is a PS2 keyboard and not USB.

---------- Post updated at 02:53 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:33 PM ----------

Can you comment on why you are doing this?
Are you intent upon booting from the diskettes, and restoring a complete hard drive from the tape?

Yes PS2 keyboard.
This is a controller attached to a tool, the controller was removed from the tool, after a week of other techs, working on it. It was handed to me, after multiple rounds of troubleshooting and making some progress I am now at this point.
By the time I got the controller the HD had already been wiped so I do not know if this was a miss diagnosed original problem.
Yes the plan is to restore from the tape backup.

My initial thought was the SCSI controller card was the problem, because even though it lists the CD as bootable I was unable to boot anything from it. Even after assigning the cards bios to boot from CD first. But I removed that as a issue when I was able to through the card bios able to format and then do a media verification on the HD.
I can do this with both of the drives I have used in the controller.

I can not progress beyond this point. After 2 days I am beginning to hit my head against the wall here. I have resolved several other unrelated issues to this, Just am uncertain how to resolve this.

hence why I am asking for guidance....

Alexander

Can you confirm that the motherboard CMOS will allow booting from the CD.
Is there an onboard IDE controller, and if so, is it/they disabled?
Since the HD is blank, and you have extra drives, why not try installing the OS again. This at least will confirm that there is nothing wrong with the keyboard controller.
The Adaptec driver is included on the original cd, so there are no BTLD (boot time loadable drivers) required.

No it does not seem to allow it, regardless the software from the manufacture is not bootable, and requires the use of the boot/ root floppies.

To prove to the initial guys the keyboard was fine I used a generic NT IDE drive I have and while NT did not love it at all. The controller was running fine using the keyboard for over a half a hour before I shut it down.

I have now tried all four sets of boot/root disks I have and same results with all.
I have another SCSI adapter that is identical coming in tomorrow to completely eliminate this as the root cause.
At this point it no longer feels it is the SCSI controller. I really feel like I am missing something simple and am just being stupid. Ill be honest its been 7 years since I touched SCO unix to say I am rusty is a understatement.


Alexander

Do all 4 machines have the same serial number?
Is the output from 'uname -X' the same for all of them.
I am beginning to think that the software supplier built one system at their site, then produced 4 machines for sale, and provided you with an emergency boot floppy, and a backup tape that you can restore; meaning that you never received a copy of the operating system, or probably any instructions on how to upgrade the hardware.
Is it possible to pull one of the other machines out of production, and install a blank drive in it as scsi id 1, then boot a standalone product like hdclone and duplicate one of the other systems. If you were to do this are there different data files on each machine?

I seem to remember from a previous time I had to go through a much less painful version. it was not the case each had diff serial numbers.
but I don't think you are far off from the overall mark.

There are significant other unique files on each system that will not play nice if i try that. If this was a different platform I would do just that.

thanks alot for taking the time on this, I really appreciate the help.

I have spent days researching this out with no solution at this point. If anyone can think of anything else I am willing to try it.

Alexander

Rather than work with diskettes and cartridge tapes:
Build a machine to replicate hard drives. Use a socket 478 or 775 motherboard with support for SATA drives in compatible mode, with a SATA disk and DVD-RW, and at least one PCI slot (for the 2940 controller.) Install SCO 5.0.6 on this machine to the SATA drive.
Add the tape drive as SCSI id 2, and add the target SCSI disk as ID 0. By default the system will boot from the IDE controller.
Restore the tape to the target disk drive. Confirm that the new drive will work in the production environment. Restore the tape to an image file on the SATA drive. Use this image file to create another target drive and test in production.
Assuming all this works, create image files for the other machines. Copy the image files to DVD for archive/backup.