Help needed with RH6.1 install on Dell PowerEdge 1550

[Carl Riches <riches ms washington edu>]

We have an application that will only run under Red Hat Linux 6.1 due to
shared library incompatibilities.  I am trying to install Red Hat 6.1 on a
Dell PowerEdge 1550 rackmount server in order to run this application.
The installation is failing in the SCSI controller
initialization.  Here is the hardware:

   Dell PowerEdge 1550/1000
     CPU:               Intel Pentium III 1GHz x 2
     NIC:               Intel 82559 PRO/100+ x 2
     Video:             ATI Rage XL, 4MB
     SCSI:              Adaptec AIC-7899
     SCSI backplane:    Dell  1x3 SCSI
     RAM:               1.128GB
     HD:                Cheetah 18XL (ST318404LC) 18.37 GB
     FD:                1.44MB
     CD-ROM:            IDE-based

The NIC, Video and SCSI controllers are built into the motherboard.

Here are the devices seen by the Adaptec controller at poweron:

  Ch A:  SCSI ID 0  Seagate  ST218404LC  160
         SCSI ID 6  DELL     1x3 BP      ASYN

Here are the error messages that I get:

At first, this message shows up and is repeated countless times:

  <4> SIMODE0 0x0, SIMODE1 0x4, SSTAT 0x0, SEQADDR 0x3
  <4>(scsi0:-1:-1:-1) aic7xxx_isr - referenced scb not valid during scsiint 0x0 scb(255)

Then this message shows up once:

  <4> SIMODE0 0x0, SIMODE1 0x4, SSTAT0 0x0, SEQADDR 0x3
  <4>SCSI aborting du to timeout: pid 7, scis0, channel0, id6, lun0,
       Test Unit Ready 00 00 00 00 00

It is then followed by a bunch of other messages like this (which scroll
past very quickly):

  <4>SCSI host0 abort (pid 7) timed out - resetting
  <4>SCSI bus is being reset for host0 channel0
  <4>SCSI hot0 channel0 reset (pid 7) time out - trying harder

There are some other SCSI error messages but they go past too quickly for
me to catch them.

The only fix that I know about is to try a different (newer) device
driver.  I downloaded the latest from Doug Ledford's AIC7xxx page at:

  http://people.redhat.com/dledford/aic7xxx.html

This gave me the following driver disk image:

  aic7xxx version 5.1.33 driver update disk for Red Hat Linux 6.1

I also tried to use the aic7xxx driver image from Justin Gibbs' AIC7xxx
page at:

  http://people.freebsd.org/~gibbs/linux/

which gave me the driver disk image:

  linux-aic7xxx-6.1.8-rh61-driver-disk.img

Both of these failed with kernel panics.

Has anyone been able to get Red Hat 6.1 to install on one of these Dell
PowerEdge 1550 machines?  If so, can you give me any pointers to make this
work?  I am being threatened with Windows NT if I can't get Red Hat 6.1 to
install.

Thanks!

Carl G. Riches
Software Engineer
Department of Mathematics
Box 354350			voice:     206-543-5082 or 206-616-3636
University of Washington	fax:       206-543-0397
Seattle, WA  98195-4350		internet:  riches ms washington edu