Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[davygrvy]

System is a supermicro P6DBU mobo with a built-in aic-7890 scsi controller with an ultra2 wide lvd 19GB drive and three cdrom drives.

So yes, this really is true ancient/true scsi. And no, I don't yet have an adaptec aro-1130u2 zero-channel raidport-III controller, but I'm looking. Real western digital wde drives are hard to find these days.. I wonder why?

Ok, so where'd I find this build?

http://ftp.nluug.nl/ftp/pub/os/Linux/distr/puppylinux/puppy-5.3/ for slacko-5.3-SCSI-PAE_HIGHMEM-ALT.iso

It runs great from the cd, but I can't do a full install. I guess it is stage-1 that bombs. first line is essentially:
kernel panic not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

I installed on the first ext2 (with boot flag) partition (200mb) sda1 to jump to sda3 ext3 hd(0,2), but no luck. sda2 happens to be the swap, btw.

So I guess the unknown-block(0,0) refers to itself as the grub loaded vmlinuz doesn't know about scsi even with the pmedia=scsihd option?

here's the contents of menu.lst

[rjbrewer]

A full install does not use an initrd line.
There should be a title line above root line.
(title can be practically anything you want)
Example;

title Lucid (on /dev/sda2)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 ro vga=normal

Grub needs to be on mbr.

[davygrvy]

all that's there, but still no joy.

yes, I didn't include the title line in the example. Why can't it see itself? scsi drivers not included in the kernel it installs, just the kernel that's run off the cdrom?

[01micko]

There is a bug in full installs with regard to SCSI. You can overcome this manually. You need to boot live and open the initd.gz and copy all the kernel files under /lib/modules to their appropriate place in your full install. That's where the SCSI drivers are hiding and why I withdrew support for SCSI in Slacko later on.

HTH

[davygrvy]

answers! you rock! Thanks.. I'm on it

[davygrvy]

01micko, can you recommend a build with true scsi support?

[01micko]

[davygrvy]

[davygrvy]

Should I just build a kernel from scratch specific for my system?

[rcrsn51]

It looks like this MOBO also has IDE slots. It might be easier to stick an IDE hard drive on one and boot off it.

[davygrvy]

NO!

I had this same discussion with SuSE tech support back in 1999, but back then the Adaptec drivers were garbage. As I recall, Adaptec even hired the BSD guy that wrote the first ones and he kicked-ass for a couple years making them sweet. But I didn't go back to Linux on this machine then.

It's been sitting idle in a closet since 2005.

[01micko]

If it works ok live just run it live. You can mount your data partitions at boot. The kernel itself should be fine if you could boot live. I still think you may need an initrd, but if you are feeling adventurous you could try to "fix" the full install by merging the kernel DOTpet with the filesystem.

Unpack the kernel pet (found on ibiblio and mirrors in the pet_packages-slacko directory). You can unpack it with tar, as it's only a tar archive with md5sum appended. Ignore the errors. Then just use cp -a --remove-destination to the root of the filesystem. If that fails to boot you surely need an initrd.

HTH

[davygrvy]

totally above my Fu

I feel challenged to solve this. This box was a pain 13 years ago and still is today. Don't know what I'll do yet, but will RTFM before I do.

[davygrvy]

CONFIG_AIC7XXX_BUILD_FIRMWARE