From: Rick Moen (rick at domain linuxmafia.com)
Date: Thu 19 Sep 2002 - 09:09:03 IST
Quoting Vincent Cunniffe (vincent at domain diva.ie):
> I have a machine with an Adaptec 2940U2W card which refuses to
> boot from a SCSI disk. There are twin 36GB SCSI's attached, and
> an IDE disk and CD-ROM. The card is a Dell OEM one.
A couple of things come to mind, after thinking about this (off and on)
for a day:
1. Red Hat's 7.x distribution installation kernels have occasionally
had problems with Adaptec AIC7xxx chipsets in combination with
particular motherboard chipsets, notably the old Intel L440GX
"Lancewood" motherboards. I don't know if this applies to your
situation at all: It just sounded roughly similar. In RH 7.1 (and
7.2?), there was a custom boot floppy available somewhere on the RH
product support pages, to compensate. A brief search through the 7.3
support pages doesn't turn up anything like that.
2. I know you said that 6.2 booted with no problem, but your hardware
situation sounds a little... eccentric. That is, you have _both_ ATA
("IDE") and SCSI hard disks, and want to boot from SCSI. Historically,
ATA option ROMs tended to grab the Int13h boot services, so mixed
ATA/SCSI systems tended to be forced to boot from ATA. I hear things
are a bit better now, but, again, the facts of your situation reminded
me of all that.
I realise that neither of those comments solves your problem, or even
gets you noticeably closer. But, since nobody else had wiser comments
to contribute, I thought I'd post what came to mind.
You're right that this may simply be a matter of the 7.3 kernel's
AIC7xxx support being not quite good enough. You might try the
RH-variant distribution that we used to maintain at $PRIOR_FIRM,
_specifically_ to fix what we saw as RH's quality-control problems:
http://www.kainx.org/vermillion/
(Yeah, Michael describes his 7.3.1 working copy as an "alpha", which is
a bit scary. But those alphas have historically been pretty damned
good.)
-- Cheers, Rehab is for quitters. Rick Moen rick at domain linuxmafia.com
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