Problem with a SCSI machine

[Timothy Murphy]

I have a SCSI machine,
a Pentium-3 with an Asus P2B-LS motherboard,
with in-built Adaptec aic7890/91 Ultra2 SCSI adapter,
and 2 SCSI disks,
to which I have recently added a large IDE disk for archiving.

I've never been able to get any kernel that comes with
any version of Fedora to boot on this machine.
In fact, I think the last Redhat kernel that booted was RH-8.2 .

Since then I have been running a compiled kernel
with SCSI built-in (as opposed to a module),
and have upgraded to each distribution as it came along.

This has worked perfectly -
I'm currently running linux-2.6.12 under FC-4.
But I'd like to have the possibility of installing Fedora
instead of upgrading.

As far as I can see, there is no attempt to load the aic7xxx driver
when I boot one of the distribution kernels
(currently vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4)
even though I have
--------------------------------
alias scsi_hostadaptor aic7xxx
alias scsi-hostadaptor aic7xxx
alias scsi aic7xxx
# pre-install aic7xxx modprobe first_module_name
--------------------------------
in /etc/modprobe.conf (and also in /etc/modules.conf).
[It does not seem to make any difference
if the last "pre-install" line is included.]

I tried running
"mkinitrd --with=aic7xxx initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4"
and installing the new initrd.
As far as I could see, the kernel did now install the aic7xxx module
but it did not seem to look for the actual SCSI disks.

A couple of subsidiary questions:

(1) I tried sending the kernel logs to another machine,
by adding a line to /etc/syslog.conf ,
and while this worked when the machine was functioning properly
(with compiled kernel)
it didn't record anything before the panic with the distribution kernels.
Nor was anything entered in /var/log/messages on the machine itself.

Is there any other way of ensuring that any kernel messages are recorded ?

(2) Is there anything I can add to the grub entry for this kernel
to ensure that the SCSI module is loaded?


Any suggestions or advice gratefully received.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland