One other note about this problem of aic7xxx not automatically loading. One of the Adaptec cards (the 2910) outputs some feedback under the BIOS while the machine comes up. This output includes the Adaptec firmware information and the scsi devices the card finds. On the other box I have the attached drives always appear but on the new box with the Tyan Tiger motherboard I always find that while the Adapatec firmware information is shown no drives are listed. Does this suggest that the BIOS is somehow blocking the attached scsi drives from being probed? Thanks in advance for any suggestions. Jack ps it still is confusing none the less why the occurance of alias scsi_hostadapter1 aic7xxx ...in /etc/modprobe.conf doesn't force the driver to be loaded anyway. As I said before, I find manually modprobe it after booting the aic7xxx driver loads and the drives appear in /proc/scsi/scsi on the scsi1 bus.