Hi,
This is a question that Tom would probably be in the best position to
answer, but if anyone else has any input, I'd appreciate that too.
I have a Compaq ProLiant 2500R which I recently upgraded from dual Pentium
Pros to dual Pentium II processors. After the upgrade, my Linux
installation will no longer work; the kernel panics because it cannot mount
the root file system. The details of my system are:
Adaptec AHA-2940 controller with a 4.3 GB drive. This is the boot drive,
and also the /tmp partition.
Compaq embedded SCSI controller (NCR53C875) with one 4.3 GB and four 9.1 GB
hot-plug SCSI drives. The 4.3 drive is home to /, /usr, /var, and /usr/src.
Compaq SMART-2/P RAID controller with no drives attached yet.
1 GB RAM
So why am I writing to this list? Well, I have used Tom's disk to boot
this system in the past, so I naturally thought that I'd give it a try when
I had problems. I got the latest version (2.0.103), and it boots fine, but
will not recognize the embedded Compaq controller, so I have no access to
/, /usr, etc. I can access all partitions on the 4.3 GB drive attached to
the Adaptec controller. After some searching, I found an older version of
Tom's disk (1.7.361), and tried it. The old version has no problems with
any of the controllers, I can mount every partition, chroot, and try to
rebuild my kernel.
But that is the main problem. Regardless of the options I choose, I cannot
get the kernel to work with the controllers correctly. The AIC-7xxx driver
has problems; it tries to probe every device ID, but fails (even on the one
drive that does exist). The ncr53c875 (or sym53c875) driver does not
complain, but I still get a kernel panic indicating that it can't mount the
root fs on 08:11 (which would be the correct major and minor numbers for
the root partition). I have also tried to use the normal I/O option
instead of memory-mapped I/O when building the kernel, but no luck.
So Tom, do you have any idea what might have changed between version
1.7.361 and 2.0.103? The kernel I am using is 2.4.16. I am not using any
distribution, but have compiled all programs on this system from the
sources. It used to work just fine before I switched to the dual
Pentium-II board. Since I can work with the system using the 1.7.361
version of tomsrtbt, I know that the hardware is supported by Linux in some
way. I just need help finding out what I must do to get the kernel to
recognize the SCSI controllers correctly.
TIA,
Carsten
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Carsten P. Gehrke
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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