This is a shoot in the dark.....
If you installed the scsi after the initial installation of ML then your
initrd is not preloading the driver.

1. Make a boot floppy and insure that it works. 
2. Check to see what and date your /boot/initrd is, date and format. ML
uses a form initrd-2.4.8-34.1mdk.img with a soft link initrd.img.
3. Look at your /etc/lilo and see / insure the the initrd is loading.
I.e
boot=/dev/hda

map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
vga=normal
default=linux
keytable=/boot/us.klt
lba32
prompt
timeout=50
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz-smp
        label=linux
        root=/dev/hda8
        initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.8-34.1mdksmp.img
        append=" hdc=ide-scsi devfs=mount"
        read-only

4. Look at your /etc/modules.conf file and insure the the appropriate
entry for the scsi adapter is indicated.

5. Make a new initrd file. See man mkinitrd for the correct command
line. NOTE! The mkinitrd normally writes the file without the .img
extension to the file so you will have to change this in the /boot dir.

6. Make sure your /etc/lilo is correct after changing the /boot/initrd
file. If changes are made insure that you run , as root, lilo -c to
install and changes made.

7. Make sure your BIOS is set to OS PNP =no

8. Boot and check any messages displayed in the /var/log/boot.log and
/var/log/dmesg.

?? What is the outcome??

Larry



"C.H. Close" wrote:
> 
 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
 


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