Hello SuSErs.

I've got an old Pentium 166mmx and I've been running narrow SCSI in it with an Adaptec 2940 for some time. Being ultra-cheap, I'd rather thow faster disks and RAM at this old box than upgrade it.

So I purchased an Adaptec 2940UW and a 4Gb UW Seagate drive to go with it. My old 2Gb narrow Seagate become /home and shares the narrow cable with a 1Gb jaz, a zip, and a generic 32x CDROM.

But, on occasions, the UW drive will sounds like it's resetting all SCSI devices. 9 times out of ten, I hear an (alarming!) 'chunk' noise (from the UW drive), a stepper motor resetting what I can only guess are the drive heads, all other drives are reset, and then things return to normal.

While annoying, I could live with occasions like that but it's the times that it *can't* auto-reset things that is the problem. The whole system goes nuts: the load rises (one morning was the first time I'd ever seen a Linux system with a load of 19!) , obviously no data gets written, I have to fsck the drives manually, and it's generally a PIA.

The cables are super-high quality; I've played with both auto and manual termination on all drives; there's nothing plugged into the external SCSI port on the card; and the SCSI driver is the standard Adaptec AIC7XXX that comes with the 2.0.35 kernel. I'll check more stuff but I've worked with SCSI for a while and at least think I know what I'm doing!

Is there a newer driver on the horizon that could fix this? Perhaps it's a known bug and I just don't know where to look?

Thanks. If I can't get this to work, I'm thinking about UDMA IDE and a new motherboard {sigh}.

The driver that's included is not the most up to date. I've downloaded the patches to the AIC7xxx driver from the RedHat FTP site and have version 5.1.4 of the AIC7xxx driver working. My system is run 24x7 and has been very stable. Have you tried doing a <CTRL>-A and checked the setup of the 2490 card? I suggest setting the termination on the card to "Auto" so the card will auto terminate. Since you don't have anything connected to the external connector, the card should be be terminated since it's at one end of the SCSI chain. Also make sure that whatever device you have at the end of the cable is also terminated properly. The latest version of the driver is 5.1.6 and it can be found at: ftp.dialnet.net in /pub/linux/aic7xxx or at ftp.redhat.com in /pub/aic. I find it very difficult to get into RedHat's FTP site and as far as I can tell, the /pub/aic directory is not on any of the RedHat mirror sites. Tony -- Tony Schlemmer | Phone : 425-372-2246 Software Developer | Fax : 425-372-2222 Global Mobility Systems, Inc. | Mobile: 425-503-8544 11201 SE 8th Street, Suite 110 | <A HREF="mailto:tschlemmer@gmswireless.com">mailto:tschlemmer@gmswireless.com</A> Bellevue, WA 98004 | <A HREF="http://www.gmswireless.com"><A HREF="http://www.gmswireless.com</A">http://www.gmswireless.com</A</A>> - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e Check out the SuSE-FAQ at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A">http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A</A>> and the archiv at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A">http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A</A>>