On Mon, 30 Aug 1999, Wang Qi wrote:
> alias scsi_hostadapter aic7xxx
> options aic7xxx aic7xxx=verbose,extended
>
> the init program can't find any SCSI card and disk!!!
Do you mean, literally, the program /sbin/init, the father of all processes,
responsible for starting any UNIX system? If you do, then I think you
misunderstand what is supposed to be happening. init doesn't care about
disks, it manages system services like the login prompt.
If you do not mean /sbin/init, please explain more. What are you doing that
you expect to trigger your SCSI driver module to load?
If your system mounts the root file system from your SCSI disk, then you
cannot have it loaded as a simple module. (The module is on the SCSI disk.
You need to load the module to read the SCSI disk. Ummm...) You have two
choices: Compile the SCSI driver into the kernel, or create an "initial
ramdisk".
I recommend compiling the driver into the kernel. This simplifies things
considerably. Since your root is on the SCSI disk, you cannot unload the SCSI
module or upgrade it without rebooting anyway, so there is little benefit to
having it as a module. Distribution VARs (e.g., Red Hat) do it so they can
distribute a single compiled kernel image and load the needed modules at boot,
without forcing the end-user to recompile the kernel. But you've already done
that...
The initial ramdisk method is more complex. Here, the boot loader loads
both the kernel image and an initial ramdisk image (initrd). The initrd is
mounted as the root filesystem, and contains the module for your SCSI host
adapter. The initrd boot script loads the module, remounts the root using the
file system from your SCSI disk, and continues the boot process from there.
If you want to use the initrd method, you will need to make an initial ram
disk image, in addition to the kernel image. Red Hat (which Mandrake is based
on) includes a command called "mkinitrd" to make this easier. See "man
mkinitrd" for details.
Hope this helps!
--
Benjamin Scott
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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