Can Puppy use SCSI hard drives?

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sulemasc
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Can Puppy use SCSI hard drives?

#1 Post by sulemasc »

I've searched the forums and read that there is no support for SCSI drives - who woulda thought this old PC had SCSI?! Anyway with an IDE CDrom installed Puppy 1.0.6 works fine - just no drives.

Is getting SCSI support way beyond a linux beginner or Puppy itself? If so I'm assuming I'll just have to get an IDE drive for this. It'd be nice to salvage the SCSI though, even if I had to do a lot of research.

With 10 or 12 more old PC's running Puppy in a cluster just think of the parallel processing power I'll have - folding at home look out ;)
Mark

edit - addon would this be useful?
http://sg.torque.net/sg/

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J_Rey
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#2 Post by J_Rey »

Have you tried Pmount or MUT (in the menu) to see if the problem is actually that the SCSI drives aren't automounted? I'm not sure about no support for SCSI. I'd assume that the Linux kernel would support it. I do remember that we don't use SCSI-emulation as default anymore. Either way, let us know if the drive are listed but not mounted so we know if we need to fix it.

sulemasc
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Can Puppy use SCSI hard drives?

#3 Post by sulemasc »

J-Rey, the Dell Dimension PC boots into RAM fine and MUT only shows fd0 and hda as the ide cdrom I installed - no hard drives. Here's some more info which may be a bit too detailed but better to err on that side.. incidentally I'm writing this on my Aptiva PIII with only 32mB of RAM as I transferred it to the Dell and Puppy is, well, not zippy, but she's allright :)

The SCSI utility comes up before the bios - here's a summary of it - hope this helps you help me...Mark

Adaptec AHA-2940 Ultra/Ultra w <- SCSISelect Utility-> v1.23
AHA-2940 Ultra/Ultra W at Bus:Device 00:0Fh

SCSI Bus Interface Definitions:
host adapter SCSI id ......7
SCSI parity checking .....enabled
host adapter SCSI termination.. automatic

additional options
boot device options boot target id..... 0
boot lun number.... 0
SCSI device configuration initiate sync negotiation.....yes
(there's 16 of them all same) maximum sync transfer rate .... 20.0
enable disconnection........ yes
initiate wide negotiation ....yes
send start unit command..... no

scan shows the following:
Id0- WDIGTL WDE4360-1807A3
Id5- NEC CD-ROM Drive:464
Id7- AHA-2940 Ultra/Ultra W

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J_Rey
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#4 Post by J_Rey »

Well, it seems like Puppy Linux doesn't include the drivers for your SCSI host adapter....

So, I guess you need to install them.

See http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?p=3060#3060 and http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/suppor ... ource+Code

more to follow ... must sleep now ....

sulemasc
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Can Puppy use SCSI hard drives?

#5 Post by sulemasc »

Thanks for the links J_rey - I will research them and post when I have results.. Mark

sulemasc
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Installing aic7xxx driver for Adaptec AHA-2940 Ultra/Ultra W

#6 Post by sulemasc »

For this SCSI host adapter to work with my cd rom and hard drive, I think I need the following modules: scsi_mod, cd_mod, and aic7xxx.o driver. Info has suggested that when you modprobe aic7xxx it is likely the other two modules are added automatically or maybe there already there. So does Puppy have scsi_mod and cd_mod already, and do I simply need to type "modprobe aic7xxx" once I have the driver installed?
On to information from http://people.freebsd.org/~gibbs/linux/ This site has two suggestions - use the RPM or Driver Update Diskette method of driver installation.
So I have more questions - firstly, the driver update diskette file listing has 15 possible files supplied - each from a different Linux distribution so I don't know which one to try as their sizes vary drastically, and the files are of type *.img.gz which guiTAR won't open, and I don't know how to open ... secondly the RPM listing has 12 possible files and I can unrpm them using the dotpup but don't know what to do from here with this avenue. What do I need to do? Mark

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J_Rey
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#7 Post by J_Rey »

Well, after searching around it appears that support for SCSI drives isn't supported in the official releases of Puppy Linux. It seems like the kernel wasn't compiled with SCSI support enabled. Although, Puppy and GNU/Linux in general is open for revising/customizing. So you would need someone else's help to either walk you through the process or do it for you and post a new CD image for download. I'm still learning Linux myself.

I'd recommend posting to this topic to unite your voices, in the mean time....

Guest

#8 Post by Guest »

My opinion on SCSI systems with puppy is:

In principal there seems to be SCSI support, but this whole SCSI stuff is rather complicated. The SCSI BIOS in some cases sends unexplainable messages during bootup, and often booting is prevented by hardware problems.
I just set up a 2nd PC with parts aut of the scrap box:

MBoard: PcChips M726MRT, onboard PCTEL sound/softmodem, USB 1.1 ohci
AMI BIOS w/SCSI boot option, PIII 450MHz, 256MB RAM
SCSI controller: Adaptec 2940AU w/BOOT ROM, BISO v1.32
SCSI CDR: Toshiba XM640, 40x
SCSI CD-R/W: Yamaha 4416
SCSI HD: none
NIC: longshine LCS8634PTB, ISA-PNP NE2k-compatible (realtek 8019)
VGA: Matrox G220 mystique

After a lot of reading SCSI documentation, BIOS parameter tinkering, exchanging of SCSI controllers and wasting time by booting a million times, i managed to boot an older puppy v1.0.1-128MB to boot off my CD drive (wich runs at the moment of writing), but puppy v1.0.7 does not boot up fully, but falls into a rudimentary shell after reporting not to find usr_cram.fs ...

I tried other distros:
DSL 2.1syslinux (and Knoppix 3.4) start to boot, but also fall into a mini shell
DSL 2.1isolinux doesn't boot
LUIT linux 0.4 boots perfectly
FREEDUC 1.4 (UNESCO edu distro) boots
UBUNTU 5.04 boots upto the session conf. stage, then is stuck (?)
...

Strange effects: When I changed the 2940AU to an older 2940U w/BIOS v1.21, only LUIT and Freeduc still boot, all others including puppy 1.01 block bootup during SCSI BIOS execution.
In certain cases which I haven't checked systematically or documentated, respctively, CD booting is possuble, if the mainboard's BIOS boot option is changed from "SCSI" to "Floppy". Now sometimes a boot message appears, telling that floppy drive A: is changed to B:, because A: is use for floppy boot emulation (or something like this...).
Obviously there are at least 3 different SCSI-CD-ROM boot procedures/loaders hanging around:
syslinux, needs a floppy image on the CD
isolinux, uses different boot image (don't understood yet)
el torito, needs a floppy image w/dedicated SCSI drivers for yor hardware.

I will further work on this, but if somebody has better knowledge of SCSI systems under Linux, his comments are welcome!

d.

Guest

#9 Post by Guest »

Anonymous wrote:
...

I tried other distros:
DSL 2.1syslinux (and Knoppix 3.4) start to boot, but also fall into a mini shell
DSL 2.1isolinux doesn't boot
LUIT linux 0.4 boots perfectly
FREEDUC 1.4 (UNESCO edu distro) boots
UBUNTU 5.04 boots upto the session conf. stage, then is stuck (?)
...

I will further work on this, but if somebody has better knowledge of SCSI systems under Linux, his comments are welcome!

d.
Addendum:

UBUNTU now boots successfully, after I had configured the right SCSI bus termination and term power - a critical issue, where mistakes can lead to erroneous results.
DSL 2.1 syslinux is also OK, when during boot in expert mode the missing driver (aic7xxx.o) for the adaptec SCSI controller is loaded from floppy. Other Knoppix based distros maybe behave in the same manner, but ... sorry, this is the puppy forum ;o
(DSL 2.1 isolinux still can't find the bootstrap.)

d.

kethd
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#10 Post by kethd »

Since SCSI is more core to the history of Linux/Unix than IDE, and our USB etc devices generally pretend to be SCSI, it's a shame to hear of such problems with using actual SCSI hardware!

It seems clear that you can certainly use SCSI with Linux -- but may have problems with Puppy. Which can only really be solved by someone who has/needs/wants SCSI badly enough pushing through the issues, and letting us all know about the solutions...

What are the best SCSI distros? Best LiveCDs?

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