Just a followup.. First, I got a chance to play a little more this afternoon & noticed upon closer inspection that it's not actually the aic7xxx driver that is causing the kernel panic. The actual stack dump shows aic79xx as the guilty party. There is a "FATAL:...." message that comes out just before the oops output and that -does- mention the aic7xxx driver that was throwing me off. Just after that though it says "loading aic79xx", and just after /that/ comes the oops. I also tried booting in safe mode. This mostly doesn't work for me either. It doesn't panic however, and it gets me to the desktop, which is good, I guess.. better anyway. :) When booting in safe mode I again get the message about a missing aic7xxx.ko, followed by "loading aic79xx". Whereas before I got the oops/panic however, now I get a couple promising messages about IRQs detected, then a couple minutes of rapidly scrolling text with all sorts of cryptic errors about SCSI-related stuff (to use the technical phrase), followed by the rest of the boot sequence and ultimately the desktop. Yay. Sort of. Unfortunately I can't see my SCSI drive at this point. An lsmod shows the aic79xx module loaded with a use count of 1, but an "fdisk -l" shows the only SCSI disk available as being the portable firewire drive I have attached to my soundblaster card (for backups). Neither the old Seagate HD nor the CDR drive I have attached to the built-in SCSI bus are accessible, or even visible. At this point I can get access to the SCSI drive(s) if I do a "rmmod -f aic79xx", followed by "insmod aic79xx". After that the drive appears in an "fdisk -l" with the proper partition info. I didn't want to risk actually mounting it at that point (it has the /home, /boot, and / dirs for my working 8.1 setup), but I did a dd as a read test, which seemed to work fine. So I'm guessing that something else in the boot process is messing up things for the aic79xx driver module. I noticed that the boot process attempts to load drivers for "sym53c8xx" and "aic7xxx" before getting to my "aic79xx". Can anyone tell me how to disable these from the boot prompt so I can see if either of those are the problem? Also, not being a big fan of writers cramp I didn't copy down the oops text. I did take a couple barely-legible pics of the oops/panic message and stack dump with my digital camera though. If anyone's interested just let me know where to send them. Finally, just to clarify, the live CD I'm using is one I burned from an ISO I downloaded from the link off www.suse.com Friday evening. I don't know if it makes a difference, but I thought I'd mention that just in case it's not the same as the one included in the 9.1 retail box. On Sun, May 16, 2004 at 10:00:02AM -0700, John Grant wrote:
I have a working 8.1 pro system that I'm thinking about upgrading to 9.1. However, this morning when I tried to boot the system from the 9.1 live CD I get an oops and kernel panic when the boot process tries to load the aic7xxx driver. ...