Hi All,
I have Mandrake 8.1 installed on an IBM IDE drive as a dual boot with
Win98 (my sons network games need this). Since I did not want MS on my
main drive I resurrected an old Adaptec 2940A pci SCSI card and an IBM
4Gig drive to go with it (the card also serves my burner). I sucessfully
loaded MS on this and all the appropriate boot entries have appeared
under Lilo. There is however one problem in that I cannot boot the
machine unless I remove the mains power first and then boot the
machine!!!
The cycle goes like this:
1. Unplug Mains plug from box
2. Boot machine and select Mandrake
3. Machine Boots
4. Log on then log off and reboot (init 6)
5. Machine reboots and reaches the point where the Adaptec SCSI bios is
searching for devices and it just hangs until the SCSI bios
prog times out, boot then progresses normally for Linux
except for error messages relating to the system not being able to find
the SCSI disk.
Obviously I can't boot MS when this happens.
6. To reboot I have to power down the machine; remove the mains plug
for a short time then
replace the mains plug and boot. Everything is then OK
The strange thing about all this is that if I boot to MS and reboot the
problem does not occur.
The conclusion I have reached is that in some way Mandrake is altering
some semi volatile part of my pci configuration which is preventing the
SCSI bios from operating correctly. Removing the power clears this
change and allows everything to work properly.
I have done quite a lot of testing such as moving around the IRQ's of
the SCSI card and I have managed to get the SCSI card on IRQ11 which I
believe is the default for Adaptecs 2940A. The default that Mandrake
picked originally was IRQ10 which did not work either.
I admit that this is an unusual configuration of drives; most people
would use the SCSI as the boot drive but his configuration worked on 8.0
the only difference was that I added the SCSI card and disk AFTER I had
done a full install. I did have to move the interrupts around though to
get it to work.
Can anyone throw any light on this!!
Regards,
C.H. Close
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
