>> But, even if I add that to the lilo.conf, how would VL suddenly support
my scsi card if it didnt during the install? Do I need to add a driver or
module (whatever its called in the linux world) for the card?
Is the Adaptec Boot BIOS turned on? If not, that will prevent it from
booting, even if you have a proper kernel.
In your case, you are booting from a floppy, which loads the Adaptec driver.
Once loaded, it can "see" the card. But without the boot BIOS turned on,
your PC won't see the card, so it won't boot from the SCSI drive, period.
To get around this, the Adaptec card (as most [not all] SCSI cards) has a
boot-time bios that will load enough code to allow the PC to boot the first
drive attached to the card (drive 0). It will appear to the PC to be a
legacy drive, and that's good enough to allow the SCSI driver to load, and
take full advantage of the card.
Why might this feature be turned off? SCSI can be used for non-boot
devices, like scanners and additional hard drives. Plus, you can have
multiple SCSI cards in a server, but you should only load the BIOS from the
card you intend to boot from. If you have multiple cards, all with the boot
bios turned on, you have a mess.
Ken Elliott
=====================
-----Original Message-----
From: slug@nks.net [mailto:slug@nks.net] On Behalf Of James
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 1:27 PM
To: slug@nks.net
Subject: [SLUG] SCSI issue
This is from a forum i go to and thought it was a good question?
Need a linux guru to help me with this one.
I decided to install linux on my an35n ultra system. Wanted a distrib that
would get me up and running right away, but lighter weight and with a bit
more learning curve. Decided to try out VectorLinux. Its based on slackware.
My problem is that I have decided to install the OSs on this system on a
scsi drive. The scsi card is an aha-29160N. Which so happens NOT to be
detected by the VL install. Someone suggested on the VL forum that I need to
boot using the Slackware scsi (adaptec.s) floppy and from there then load
the VL root floppy to start the install. This worked perfectly. But, I am
stuck with needing to use the Slackware floppy to boot root on the scsi
drive. VL runs fine ...though lacking some hardware support ...it seems like
a great distribution, I'm hoping to get the boot issue resolved and then see
if the missing hardware can also be resolved ...which should be no problem
...hopefully.
Now as far as I understand I need to use initrd because I am booting from a
scsi drive. Not sure why I need a ramdisk image to do this. ?? But, even if
I add that to the lilo.conf, how would VL suddenly support my scsi card if
it didnt during the install? Do I need to add a driver or module (whatever
its called in the linux world) for the card? Another suggestion I was given
is to replace the kernel with the kernel from the slackware floppy. ?? I am
not at all sure how to do that and if it is even a good idea. What worries
me further is the fact that my promise IDE card is not supported and I would
assume that it would not be using the slackware kernel. ...but, as you can
see, I am over my head here.
Any suggestions?
JamesS
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