LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Tarek Heiland <tarek@bakas.com.au>
  To  : 'Craig Chandler' <craig.chandler@student.adelaide.edu.au>
  Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 18:00:16 +0930

RE: SCSI setup problems

I've got one of the real early Adaptec 1542CF (well before P n Pray) and
have never experienced any problems installing any linux flavours.

One thing that has caused me grief and is symptomatic of your troubles is a
bad SCSI cable. If you have a bad connection (intermittant, high impedance
etc) it can cause uncharacteristic failures at uneven intervals. It took me
ages to track mine down as my diagnostics mostly passed. (Ps have you
checked the obvious - your terminations, it can be software controlled from
the bios or turned on by dip switch)

Due to me running my SCSI card at non standard I/O port I have always had to
use a bootstring to explicitly tell linux where to find my Adaptec card.
This has the added bonus of not having to rely on any autodetect modes
ensuring maximum chance of getting it right.

I believe Redhat sttings are


	 aha1542=io_base,buson,busoff,dmaspeed

defaults are 
	io_base=0x330 (I tend to set my card or 0x130 as less hardware
conlicts eg snd cards)
	buson=11
	busoff=4
	dmaspeed=5

This syntax differs from flavour to flavour and generally has to be nutted
out. I have heard that freeBSD is easier to get going the first time.
Slackware, SCO etc have more hardware based settings in their string so you
do not need to guess things like buson, busoff.

Regards
	Tarek



-----Original Message-----
From: Craig Chandler [mailto:craig.chandler@student.adelaide.edu.au]
Sent: Sunday, 19 September 1999 18:21
To: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
Subject: SCSI setup problems


First of all thanks to those who replied to my enquiries on setting up a
linux box as a gateway, the suggestions put forward were helpful and all
went well.

I'm now trying to install Linux on an old 486 that I got my hands on. It has
an Adaptec 1542 SCSI controller that drives a Quantum 500 M HD as well an
old internal Syqest drive. Everything was working fine under DOS and win
3.11.

When I try to install Linux (redhat 5.2, 6.0 and Openlinux 2.2-N) the
install will drop out midway through the package install with the following
error

install exited abnormally -- recieved signal 11
sending termination signals...done
sending kill signals...done
unmounting filesystems...
    /tmp/rhimage
    /mnt/proc
    /mnt/
    /proc
you may safely reboot your system

(this is the redhat message anyway)

This happens at different stages on different packages

Does anyone have ideas??

Craig

-- 
Check out the LinuxSA web pages at http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject

-- 
Check out the LinuxSA web pages at http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject