If this is a frequently asked question, I haven't been able to find
the answer, sorry. I'm trying to help someone else in the lab install
an Adaptec 2940U/W card in a HP Vectra XU tower (200 MHz Pentium Pro).
The HP already has an Adaptec AIC-7880 Ultra SCSI host adapter
somewhere inside the case and the internal Seagate disk is connected
to it. It is running RedHat Linux 5.2 with all the errata RPMs
including the RPMs in the kernel-2.2 directory and the kernel version
(built just today using the kernel source RPM from RedHat's Rawhide
FTP site as a starting point) is 2.2.2-ac7.
We want to use the Adaptec 2940U/W card to attach an external chassis
containing two Seagate SCSI drives and a Quantum tape drive to the HP.
I was told that the external chassis doesn't work with the on-board
AIC-7880 SCSI host adapter, so that's why they have to add the 2940U/W
card. The problem is that when we insert the card into the expansion
bay and reboot, the aic7xxx driver will find the 2940U/W card first
("scsi0") before it finds the AIC-7880 adapter ("scsi1"). This means
that /dev/sda, which used to be the internal Seagate disk, is now one
of the drives in the external chassis. This prevents RedHat Linux
from booting all the way since it can't find its root filesystem!
We don't want to change /etc/fstab (not to mention editing
/etc/lilo.conf and rerunning lilo to tell it the boot is something
else than /dev/sda). We want the AIC-7880 adapter to be always scsi0
whether the Adaptec 2940U/W card is present or not and we want the
internal drive to be always known as /dev/sda. I have not been able
to find such a way. I tried building the aic7xx driver into the
kernel and putting
append="aic7xxx=reverse_scan,verbose"
in /etc/lilo.conf; I also tried typing
linux aic7xxx=reverse_scan
at the LILO prompt while booting. Neither attempt succeeded in
convincing the aic7xxx driver to number the AIC-7880 as scsi0 instead
of scsi1. Do any of you have any advice how to ensure that we can
always boot RedHat Linux successfully from the internal disk even if
we insert the 2940U/W card or we attach the external chassis and then
remove it at a later time?
John
--
John Interrante, Computer Scientist, Information Technology Laboratory
GE Corporate Research & Development, Niskayuna, New York
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