RH 5.0 Install failure: Adaptec 2842 at fault?

[Mark Poler <m poler ieee org>]

Greetings to all. Perhaps someone will be able shed light on installation
problems that I have been having with a newly obtained RH 5.0 distribution.
I have been working at this for over a week without success. The
information below is in summary form; he details would be overwhelming.
Perhaps some of you can offer advice on sifting through the details to find
the needle in the haystack. I have searched the archives without finding
the critical facts.

Brief system description:
486 VLB motherboard, 16MB or 48MB RAM
AMD K5 (Evergreen) accelerator in the 486 socket (133 MHz)
VLB IDE controller, 2 x 1.2M Connor IDE drive (hda, hdb)
VLB Adaptec 2842 (on IRQ11):	Micropolis 1991 9GB (sda)
			Chinon SCSI CD-ROM
3.5" and 5.25" floppies
Serial mouse
Diamond S3 video (can't remember exactly which one; it's at home)
[DOS 6.20, WFWG 3.11, OS/2 Warp 3, Caldera Preview 2 all loaded and working
on hda and hdb]

Similar problems occur whether loading from the boot floppy using either
the default install script or expert mode. The same thing happens, just at
different milestones. Using autoboot from DOS to load directly from the
CD-ROM also works up to the same point (almost: it doesn't clear the screen
and start a blue screen before crashing).

* Booting and hardware detection work initially and correcly identify
hardware (except noting no SCSI controller, as documented).
* After choosing a CD install and SCSI, the SCSI bus is probed, finding the
CD and sda.
* If I run with 48 MB installed the crash and register dump come before
even offering the choice of installation or upgrade, so partitioning is
never an option; with 16 MB installed the crash is delayed until after
announcing entry of the second stage install, after partitioning and
defining mounting points.
* Partitioning works best with fdisk; Disk Druid is uncooperative (can't
find any free space on the empty, unpartitioned sda). DOS FDISK readily
partitions the SCSI drive appropriately. Formatting and access to the DOS
drives so defined works as expected.
* Using expert mode, after setting mount points for created partitions the
CD is accessed, second stage install is announced, and the system pauses
about 20 seconds before doing a register dump, "Aiee, stopping interrupt
handler", and a hard hand (reset switch is dead). 
* On restarting the computer, the boot floppy will be cross-linked, even if
write-protected.
* If I go through the setup process again, fdisk will announce a corrupt
partition table and asks to initialize sda again.
* Two different SCSI cables and different combinations of termination don't
seem to make a difference.

Autoprobing, defining a kernel option of "adaptec=extended", and use of
expert mode to either select the 284x or explicitly define the port, irq,
etc of the 2842 controller all seem to have similar outcomes.

Capturing the register dumps has not been possible because the initial
lines scroll off the top of the screen. No keystrokes work to try to get a
printer screen dump. I have not discovered a log file.

I will be grateful for any assistance that you may offer, either insights
to debugging this problem or solutions offered.

Best Regards, and Happy New Year,

Mark

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Mark Poler
M POLER IEEE ORG
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