On Sun, Feb 06, 2005 at 4:50:01PM -0500, Carl E. Hartung wrote:
The CD is fine.
Well, not if you're using a sym53c895 SCSI controller, apparently.
1. If you were installing 9.2 on IDE instead of SCSI, you'd have made the module diskettes, used them to complete your installation and */maybe/* you'd be thinking about why your CD drive isn't letting you boot normally off the Linux CD.
If I were using IDE instead of SCSI, I wouldn't be concerned with the sym53c895 SCSI module at all; the whole issue would be moot. Fwiw, I made the boot disk set and booted from floppy, just to eliminate the CD boot as a variable (all previous installs have been via boot diskette).
2. If you were adding this SCSI controller into an already functioning 9.2 system, you'd /still/ be forced to deal with whatever the firmware / module / config issues are.
Exactly. It seems SuSE 9.2 is contra-indicated for use with sym53c895 based systems. Perhaps, as another respondent indicated, the sym53c8xx module works with another SCSI controller that is not the sym53c895, but as it comes out of the box, SuSE 9.2 does not work with the sym53c895.
So, try not to confuse one problem with the other. And please don't become prematurely discouraged or disappointed with SuSE *or* Novell *or* 9.2. This is a great distribution -- you just have a couple of unique 'humps' to overcome.
Notice I didn't say "look for a different distro..." :) I'd like very much to be able to use it. I am disappointed that a fairly popular essential piece of hardware, that worked perfectly well under earlier SuSE distros has ceased to work in 9.2. I can see tripping up over this issue early on in the distro release process, with all the various bits of hardware to cover, but when the reports start coming in, I'd be a lot less disappointed if I saw evidence of a fix or a workaround emanating from SuSE. Connecting with the hard disk is a pretty fundamental part of installing a distro, a real show stopper.
| The images on the CD seem to have a boot sector and a disk full | of stuff that's not individual files. Will linuxrc take a module | from a normal ext2 diskette? <whack>
It just so happens that I've always used rawwrite.exe under Windows (Gasp!) to create the floppies. Why? Because the only time I need a Linux diskette is when the system that I need it for is down! The rest of the time stuff goes in and out of the box via TCP/IP, CDRW, etc,. Besides, MS makes a /great/ diskette duplication platform! ;-)
If you've got a spare MS box around. I'm all linux here. :) But how the diskette is copied is not the question; it's whether the image can be a simple module sym53c8xx.o, copied to a diskette with an ext2 filesystem on it and subsequently loaded into the installation process with linuxrc or whatever.
Anyway, the first step here is to isolate the exact cause of your SCSI adapter problem.
The most relevant threads I was able to find in English were several bug reports, and an 8-article discussion on alt.os.linux.suse that seemed to conclude that several posters had problems with the sym53c8xx module and the 2.6 kernel, whereas all had been well with the 2.4 kernels. No one had any workarounds to suggest. searching: site:suse.com sym53c8xx "9.2" gives 4 results, all in German. Some other search recipes give other German results, and one in Russian, if I'm not mistaken. Unfortunately, my language skills extend only to English.
You may have to update the controller bios...
Really? Would a newer kernel or driver require a bios upgrade? Are there even Linux tools to do that? That seems like a very hostile feature, that most driver maintainers would take pains to avoid.
or pass some parameters to the module before it loads... or, or, or. It's all conjecture at this point. If you'd like, get some of this research done and holler back.
Some posters referred to above said they'd tried various parameters, all to no avail. They didn't say just what parameters they'd tried. One poster mentioned the prospect of different interrupt handling in the 2.6 kernel being a potential problem. There was considerable discussion of various patching strategies for the sym53c8xx for use in a pcmcia environment. There may well be a workaround, possibly involving compiling a patched kernel, or a patched sym53c8xx module. If that's the case, I'd think SuSE might want to put up the results for offer on their site. The simplest workaround would be to offer installers the choice of falling back to the 2.4 kernel series, which seems to work splendidly. If moving to the 2.6 series renders the distro un-installable, maybe the 2.4 kernel would be the way to go. I can't think of anything else to research. If anyone from SuSE is following this thread, it'd be nice to know where someone in my position stands. I'd hate to waste a couple hundred hours chasing a dead end, which is what 9.2 looks like at this point. Does anyone have any other suggestions? One more procedural question: since the kernel messages are obviously stored somewhere by linuxrc and yast, it seems I should be able to copy them to a floppy before abandoning the installation. Does anyone know where they're stored? Has anyone saved those messages this way? If I persue this on the newsgroups, it'd be nice to be able to share the error messages I see; they're way too extensive, in way too tiny type for me to copy by hand. Jim