On Friday 09 May 2003 7:59 am, roncordell@attbi.com wrote:
Yes, I did turn off the onboard IDE stuff as you suggest.
Your idea of using the manual installation and specifying the aic7xxx_old driver was something that I hadn't thought of. I'll give that a try.
I have had problems (many) with the current aic7xxx module. I would have thought they would be fixed by now and I shudder to think that the kernel developers might someday drop the aic7xxx_old. But I have had many machines that had two controllers... but usually the CD-roms and tape drives were put on something lesser like a Adaptec 1522 or now a 2906 ($50). Never have had any problems installing with the two controllers with the exception that the install wouldn't find the CD-rom and I would have to go through the 'load extra modules' part of the setup. No biggie. The BIOS on one of your cards should be disabled... Is it? And your main bios needs to be told to boot from the SCSI controller. I must admit that at times, I have had to plug the CD-roms into the main controller in order to do an install, but that is only a temporary thing until the install is done and it only takes a minute. Good luck!
The reason that I wanted to try two SCSI cards is for two reasons:
1. One of the hard drives is not a wide device, so I wanted to put that drive on a different card, with the CD and DVD, keeping the faster wide devices on their own card, just as you mention.
2. I have been experiencing read errors on various devices with everything on the one 2640U2W card, so I was experimenting to see if the problem would go away. Since the card was in PCI slot 2, I was thinking that it may be a shared interrupt issue, but I am not certain. I thought of trying the aic7xxx_old driver to see if this resolved anything as well.
I am expecting to receive an Adaptec 29160 card any day now, and I may give that a try, but I don't have a 64 bit PCI slot to place it in.
-ronc
On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 06:31, roncordell@attbi.com wrote:
Hi all,
I seem to have a problem with installing SuSE (or any Linux, for that
matter)
on a system with multiple SCSI adapters. I think the problem is how the
system
is configured, not with SuSE or Linux itself, so I was hoping someone could tell me what I might be doing wrong.
M/B - Abit BE6-II 800Mhz P3 768MB Ram, onboard HPT366 IDE (disabled) SCSI Adapter #1 (in PCI slot #2) - Adaptec 2940UW, SCSI ID = 2 - CD R/W Drive, SCSI ID = 1 - DVD Drive, SCSI ID = 5 - Hard Drive #1, SCSI ID = 6 SCSI Adapter #2 (in PCI slot #4) - Adaptec 2940U2W, SCSI ID = 7 - Hard Drive #2, SCSI ID = 0 - Hard Drive #3, SCSI ID = 4
When I place the SuSE 8.2 DVD installation disk, I get the message on the
boot
screen (BIOS) that a bootable disk is in the DVD drive. The IsoLinux image boots (pretty SuSE 8.2 installation Welcome screen), and I see the progress
bar
load the image from the DVD. Then the screen goes black, with just a
blinking
cursor, and hangs there. I don't see any other information that helps me
see
what's going wrong.
I have tried everything I can think of in BIOS settings, SCSI BIOS
settings,
etc. to make this work, but nothing seems to help. Everything has the
latest
BIOS updates. I've looked on the SuSE support db, and I don't see anything
that
resembles this problem. I've googled around and haven't found anything, and
the
folks on my local linux ug list don't seem to know anything.
Does anyone out there have some insight that might be able to help me?
Thanks,
-ronc
Most of the possible suggestions that I was going to mentioned were covered quite well by rex@nosyntax.net in his responses to your query.
I have two desktops set up with 2 scsi cards each and they work awesome with SuSE of all variants including 8.2
Your boot hard disk probably should be id "0" and you definitely have to ensure that the scsi card recognizes the hard disk as "bootable". Having the boot hard drive on the same scsi card as the cd and dvd will cause the install to be slow, as the dvd and hard drive will be in use at the same time and the scsi card will operate at the speed of the slower device (20 mb/s). If possible, connecting all the the hard drives (faster devices) to the 2940u2w and leaving the peripherals (slower devices) on the 2940uw would be a preferable setting.
BTW the setup I typically use is to install the slower scsi card with the peripherals in pci slot 1 or 2 (shared irq). The faster scsi card in pci slot 3 or 4 with the hard drives. The boot drive is always set to id "0" from the second scsi card. This setup works without problems.
Because you can get the isoLinux image started and then the dvd hangs I suspect that my comments above and the suggestions that others have sent
to do not fully address your situation. I did not have any problems with SuSE 8.2 being installed on my Adaptec 29160 cards, but I and others had problems with installing SuSE 8.1 and apparently also the Adaptec 2940 series of cards. The solution was to select a "manual installation" and then select the scsi module to be loaded. Choose the "OLD aic7xxx" rather than the new module. Using the "old" module made the install work for the 29160 and 2940 cards with SuSE 8.1, so give that a try.
Of course there is also the common standby with SuSE 8.2 of installing with "ACPI off".
ps. Not familiar with the ABIT motherboard that you are using but did you go in to the motherboard BIOS and switch off the IDE controller and set the IDE hard drives to "none" and set the boot device to "SCSI"?
HTH -- Ralph Sanford - If your government does not trust you, rsanford@telusplanet.net - should you trust your government?
DH/DSS Key - 0x7A1BEA01
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