Christopher Mahmood tapped away at the keyboard with:
* Bernd Felsche (bernie@innovative.iinet.net.au) [020501 07:40]:
I'm having a problem installing 7.3 on a DIGITAL Prioris XL 5100 server. The system previously ran SCO Open Server 5.04.
SuSE installation fails to detect the PCI bus (according to the kernel messages) and therefore the on-board AIC-7870 SCSI to use the CDROM and hard drive.
PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.00 entry at 0xf0001, last bus=0 PCI: System does not support PCI
Is there some boot argument I can use for the installation to recognize the strange EISA/PCI hardware?
System has a single 200MHz Pentium, 256MB RAM, Toshiba SCSI CDROM, SONY DAT and 2GB SCSI hard disk.
Refer me to a manual I probably don't have and tell me that installation isn't covered by installation support. But no _reason_ why it's not covered.
If the kernel doesn't recognize your bus there's not a whole lot isupport can do to fix this. Sure, it might be possible to pass some magic to the kernel but I'm almost certain that we don't have this hardware anywhere in the company. If the supporter suggested a few guesses that failed or made your machine burst into flames would you be posting that SuSE support sucks because they should have just admitted that they were stumped instead of guessing?
They can... because the kernel does support different methods of recognizing the bus, though not automatically. See below. Instead of telling me nothing by saying it's "not covered by instalaltion support", they could refer me to the appropriate documentation. I understand that SuSE can't have all sort of hardware sitting around to validate an installation.
"we will gladly provide assistance for the following issues: ... Installation on the 1st or 2nd hard disk in an IDE-only or SCSI-only system incl. the analysis of resource-conflicts. "
Yes, PCs have buggy useless BIOSes that making booting much harder than it needs to be.
I'm advised that I can use sdb, which I did to no avail, along with prolonged and intense searches on the WWW for two solid days before asking SuSE for _installation_ support.
If you couldn't find the answer in the LKML archives than it's probably safe to say that Linux (not SuSE or Redhat or whatever) doesn't support your hardware.
A web search indicated that such a machine was running Linux (Mandrake). [http://www.int.pan.wroc.pl/ls/serwery_pol.html] That was the reason I even persisted for four days after initial difficulties. And yes; SuSE does install once you give it some "magic" as defined in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt -- which I found at 2245 on Sunday night. Minimal SuSE was installed and running 2 hours later. Re-installed again after plugging in all the hardware I'd removed to eliminate possible conflicts. -- /"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia \ / ASCII ribbon campaign | I'm a .signature virus! X against HTML mail | Copy me into your ~/.signature / \ and postings | to help me spread!