Ref: 11640094
Title: Nine Physical Drives on 3S/400 or 3S/500 Cause Server Hang
Date: 12/17/90

Copyright 3Com Corporation, 1991.  All rights reserved.

Under 3+Open 1.1F, a 3S/400 or 3S/500 with more than eight physical
disk drives (four expansion units with two drives each, plus the base
unit drive) will cause the server to hang during bootup at "Loading
E3S386$" on the LCD.

LASTBOOT will report a Trap 000D error.  The LCD will show that Init SCSI
2,3,4,... worked fine, but then it will hang for no reason.  All hardware
checks out.

The problem is cache.  The Release Guide for 3+Open 1.1F, page 35, explains
that only eight physical disk drives can be cached for lazy writes.  (Eleven
disk drives can be cached for reads.)  Using the default setting
CACHE /LAZY:*:ON causes the problem when you have nine or more drives.  The
asterisk (*) tries to lazy-write to all physical drives it can find.

To solve the problem, specify each drive that you want to have lazy writes on
by putting a drive letter instead of the asterisk (*).  This requires eight
separate cache lines in the STARTUP.CMD for the eight drives that you want
cached for lazy writes.  See the Release Guide, page 35, for more information.

