installation hangs during (after?) downloading scsi stuff on P133
Anders Lennartsson writes:
| Yesterday I tried to install debian on an old machine for use as a
| X-terminal at work. The machine is a Dell P133 (the first machine
| I've acutually laid hands on with the F0 bug!) with 96Mb of memory, an
| Adaptec 2940 and a Seagate 1.3Gig SCSI HD. It booted nicely on the
| rescue disk but after identifying the 2940 it downloaded some commands
| to it and then seemed to freeze.
|
| Anyone experiencing similar events? Could it be the SCSI bios?
Jim Ray writes:
| I'm fed up with redhat. end of story. so, i downloaded debian iso's
| at work, burned to 2 cd's, took it home ready to install. I inserted
| the cd--to boot--which it did just fine. the debian boot process
| started just fine. everything was going well until it got to the
| point about recognizing my scsi card. i have an adaptec 2940 with a
| yamaha cd-rw attached to it--that's it. all my hard drives are ide,
| and the cd from which i was booting is atapi. but when it got to the
| part about recognizing my scsi card, the whole system froze. i got
| response from the keyboard. no ctrl-alt-delete response. nothing. I
| rebooted. same thing. i booted from the scsi cd drive. boot process
| went along fine, until it got to recognizing the scsi card, and the
| system froze. is there an updated boot image i should use, from a
| floppy. I noticed that the kernel for the cd boot image (debian 2.1)
| was kernel 2.0.39 (not entirely sure about that--i do know that it's
| pre 2.2.x) the redhat install worked just fine, recognizing my adaptec
| card. should i remove the scsi card and install from there, or is
| there a more sane workaround?
To both:
Yes, I experienced the same (using AHA2940AU). No, Installing / Not
installing the SCSI BIOS appeared to make no difference. My guess is
that the SCSI code in the generic kernel is trying to cope with too many
different card types, and screwing over the 2940. In my case, the 2940
is an AU, not wide; which might be making things worse. Neither of you
mention whether you're using a wide card or not.
I solved things simply by taking out the card for the install, compiling
a custom kernel, and everything runs fine[*]. Jim, this should work for
you. Anders, I guess you'll have to pre-compile, since I guess the SCSI
drive is the only one. I'm afraid I can offer no advice about making
install kernels. Suffice that I tried the alternate rescue images, to
no avail.
Mx.
[*] Actually, not all is fine. Jim, this may particularly affect you; I
have 3 devices: CD-ROM (Plextor 40TSi), CD-RW (Plextor PX-4220Ti), and
DVD-RAM (Panasonic LF-D101E). Use of the CD-RW caused SCSI Resets after
about 100M transferred, which naturally toasted me a coaster, and the
reset never succeeded --- it was a reboot job. Turning off the BIOS
Installation on the card sorted this problem; I know not why...
On a sideline note, if anyone has got cdrdao working on a PX-4220Ti, I'd
like to know how. Come to that, just success with cdrdao would be of
interest. Everything it writes is readable only by the CD-RW, which is
of limited benefit...
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