Hi Folks, One of the stupidest things I've ever seen is the way IBM-PC derived motherboards change SCSI disk assignments when disks are added or removed. I just finished a nice SuSE 7.2 installation on a TYAN Thunder K7 using the internal SCSI controllers and a PCI Adaptec SCSI-2 board for the CDRom and a JAZ drive. I also installed an IDE disk to host Win-2K. All went well, I could use the nice SuSE lilo screen to select either Linux or Win-2k for booting. Life was good and I was almost ready to deliver the system. Alas, I forgot to plug the JAZ drive into the controller. When doing this, the JAZ disk appeared as /dev/sda, with the original boot disk now appearing as sdb. Kernel-panics quickly ensued. I fiddled with mounting labels in fstab instead of specifying the actual /dev/xxx devices, but lilo knows nothing of this. The swap partitions also danced and you can't label a non-ext2 partition. If the new disks would only appear after the existing ones, all would be well. Alas, the PCI scsi controller appears as SCSI-0, in front of the built-in ones, thus all disks on that controller will push all the others into oblivion. Any suggestions? Should I be using G4 systems instead? Regards, Lew Wolfgang
On Wednesday 03 Oct 2001 9:42 pm, Lewie Wolfgang wrote:
I just finished a nice SuSE 7.2 installation on a TYAN Thunder K7 using the internal SCSI controllers and a PCI Adaptec SCSI-2 board for the CDRom and a JAZ drive. I also installed an IDE disk to host Win-2K. All went well, I could use the nice SuSE lilo screen to select either Linux or Win-2k for booting. Life was good and I was almost ready to deliver the system.
According to the Tyan web site the controller on the motherboard is an Adaptec AIC-7899W U160 controller. Assuming your PCI card is also an AIC-7xxx series card (my AHA-2940 is an AIC-7861) I think your at the mercy of the linux driver as all of the AIC-7xxx controllers are handled by the one linux module.
If the new disks would only appear after the existing ones, all would be well. Alas, the PCI scsi controller appears as SCSI-0, in front of the built-in ones, thus all disks on that controller will push all the others into oblivion. You might try fiddling with the Adaptec PCI card BIOS settings (if you have not done so already you might try turning off boot disk support?).
Hope this helps Roger -- Roger L.S. Griffiths, BSc (Hons) Gott würfelt nicht (God does not play dice) - Albert Einstein
Hi Roger, Yes, they are all Adaptec AIC-7xxx controllers. I already tried turning off boot-disk support on the PCI controller, no joy. Hm... I wonder what would happen if I replaced the Adaptec PCI controller with a Buslogic? Thanks, Lew On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Roger L.S. Griffiths BSc (Hons) wrote:
According to the Tyan web site the controller on the motherboard is an Adaptec AIC-7899W U160 controller. Assuming your PCI card is also an AIC-7xxx series card (my AHA-2940 is an AIC-7861) I think your at the mercy of the linux driver as all of the AIC-7xxx controllers are handled by the one linux module.
If the new disks would only appear after the existing ones, all would be well. Alas, the PCI scsi controller appears as SCSI-0, in front of the built-in ones, thus all disks on that controller will push all the others into oblivion. You might try fiddling with the Adaptec PCI card BIOS settings (if you have not done so already you might try turning off boot disk support?).
Hi Lew,
Yes, they are all Adaptec AIC-7xxx controllers. I already tried turning off boot-disk support on the PCI controller, no joy.
Hm... I wonder what would happen if I replaced the Adaptec PCI controller with a Buslogic? Since they would then be handled by different modules you could perhaps recompile the kernel with the AIC-7xxx driver as built-in and the Buslogic driver as a module. That way the AIC-7xxx driver should be processed first.
Regards, Roger -- Roger L.S. Griffiths, BSc (Hons) Gott würfelt nicht (God does not play dice) - Albert Einstein
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Lewie Wolfgang -
Roger L.S.Griffiths BSc