I have a SCSI machine, a Pentium-3 with an Asus P2B-LS motherboard, with in-built Adaptec aic7890/91 Ultra2 SCSI adapter, and 2 SCSI disks, to which I have recently added a large IDE disk for archiving. I've never been able to get any kernel that comes with any version of Fedora to boot on this machine. In fact, I think the last Redhat kernel that booted was RH-8.2 . Since then I have been running a compiled kernel with SCSI built-in (as opposed to a module), and have upgraded to each distribution as it came along. This has worked perfectly - I'm currently running linux-2.6.12 under FC-4. But I'd like to have the possibility of installing Fedora instead of upgrading. As far as I can see, there is no attempt to load the aic7xxx driver when I boot one of the distribution kernels (currently vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4) even though I have -------------------------------- alias scsi_hostadaptor aic7xxx alias scsi-hostadaptor aic7xxx alias scsi aic7xxx # pre-install aic7xxx modprobe first_module_name -------------------------------- in /etc/modprobe.conf (and also in /etc/modules.conf). [It does not seem to make any difference if the last "pre-install" line is included.] I tried running "mkinitrd --with=aic7xxx initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4" and installing the new initrd. As far as I could see, the kernel did now install the aic7xxx module but it did not seem to look for the actual SCSI disks. A couple of subsidiary questions: (1) I tried sending the kernel logs to another machine, by adding a line to /etc/syslog.conf , and while this worked when the machine was functioning properly (with compiled kernel) it didn't record anything before the panic with the distribution kernels. Nor was anything entered in /var/log/messages on the machine itself. Is there any other way of ensuring that any kernel messages are recorded ? (2) Is there anything I can add to the grub entry for this kernel to ensure that the SCSI module is loaded? Any suggestions or advice gratefully received. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
