FT//ex with NetWare and Maxtor 540MB MXT-540S SCSI Disk

The Apricot FT//ex series (and the new FT//ex 1000 series) servers use an integral Adaptec SCSI controller (the FT//ex has the AIC7770 and the FT//ex 1000 has the AIC7870). The NetWare drivers for this hardware (AIC7770.DSK and AIC7870.DSK) have been written such that they can use a SCSI feature called command tag queuing, and by default this feature is enabled. Some SCSI disks do not support this feature, and the Maxtor 540MB MXT-540S disk is one of those drives.

The result of using a drive that does not support command tag queuing with the driver in its default state is that the server may appear to hang when mounting volumes, and you may get drive deactivation messages on the server.

In order to turn off the command tag queuing feature in the AIC7770.DSK and AIC7870.DSK drivers, the following command should be used:-

LOAD AIC7770 SLOT=9 TAG_DISABLE=FFFF MAX_NONTAGS=1
or
LOAD AIC7870 SLOT=9 TAG_DISABLE=FFFF MAX_NONTAGS=1

Note that the Maxtor 540MB MXT-540S SCSI disk is the only SCSI disk supplied by Apricot that is suitable for installing into the FT//ex and FT//ex 1000 servers that does NOT support command tag queuing.

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