Those of you familiar with "old" PC hardware will know that the 1542 is
really the benchmark ISA SCSI card i.e. if a SCSI device would work with a
PC, it would work with a 1542. I've used a lot of them over the years,
with DOS, various kinds of Windoze, Linux . . . and never had a problem
until now. Hardware wise, the card would appear to be OK. I attached a
drive with a DOS partition, booted from a DOS floppy and there was drive D
(or maybe C) without needing any driver software i.e. just BIOS support.
It's one of the later 1542s (CP, I think - it's not to hand) with a SCSI-2
external connector. Anyway, to get to the point - it will NOT work with
Linux. I've tried SuSE 6.3, Mandrake 6.1, and Redhat 5.1 none of which can
find the card when I say that I have a SCSI card. I've tried giving the
appropriate module options but then it hangs (q.v.). If I build a kernel
with 1542 support and boot from it, the card is found but then booting
takes forever because the kernel times out looking for a device at each
target ID when it normally skips over those IDs which have no devices.
Any ideas would be welcome. It strikes me that it must be hardware
because I've tried numerous kernel versions but the hardware works under
DOS. Also, I've tried it in a couple of boxes so it's not a motherboard
thing.
Regards, Niall O Broin
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