[ILUG] Little SCSI problem for you

[Timothy Murphy]

Now that you have sorted out that serious Gentoo/Ubuntu difficulty
perhaps you could  turn your capacious minds to my little problem,
which has lurked at the bottom of my ToDo list for a couple of years.

I have a venerable machine (lets call it "alfred") with two SCSI discs,
and an Asus P2B-LS motherboard
with built-in Adaptec aic7890 Ultra2 SCSI adapter.

The problem (well, it is more an intellectual than a practical problem)
is that I can only run Linux kernels with the scsi driver in the kernel
(rather than as a module).
This means I cannot run the "official" Fedora kernels,
but have always had to run a compiled kernel,
and update rather then install the OS.

As far as I can see, the official kernel
does not appear to install the scsi driver
(though I could be wrong, as the messages flash past too fast),
even though I have
===============================
alias scsi_hostadaptor aic7xxx
alias scsi-hostadaptor aic7xxx
alias scsi aic7xxx
===============================
in /etc/modprobe.conf (and /etc/modules.conf).

When I make a new initrd with
"mkinitrd --with=aic7xxx" then I see on the screen
that the driver _is_ loaded,
but the SCSI discs are not found,
resulting in the usual panic.

I notice that with the aic7xxx driver in the kernel,
it takes a surprisingly long time - about 10 seconds -
to find the two SCSI discs.

I'd like to submit a bugzilla,
but the last part of the oops messages which I see on the screen
are useless, I think -
the relevant error messages flashed by earlier.
(I thought I'd try to print them out,
but with udev the printer device is not defined until much later.)

Incidentally, I updated the BIOS (and the SCSI BIOS) a few months ago
to the latest version I could find on the official Asus site,
which I think was dated 2001, but this didn't have any effect.

There you are then.
First correct solution opened before July 1 gets the usual prize -
$70,000,000 cheque drawn on Lagos account.

Genuinely, all suggestions and advice gratefully received.







-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland