SCSI hangs or unrecognized at boot

[ranxerox]

I am unable to load my cobbled-together system with a standard (if ancient) Adaptec AHA-2940 Ultra Wide SCSI Card in its slot. If I do, it installs fine, but it won't boot. It hangs very early into the progress bar.

If I install without the card in its slot and then install the card everything works fine. Mostly. I can mount the drive, add it to /etc/fstab, etc.

However, the drive won't auto-mount at system boot. When I login the drive isn't mounted no matter how I configure its entry in /etc/fstab.

I want this drive to be /home. When I wait until after login to mount it strange things happen. I think that /home is a bad thing to change after login. Makes sense.

So I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to adjust the way my SCSI driver is configured so that the drive will ready in time for the auto-mount without locking up during boot.

[OU812]

Re: SCSI hangs or unrecognized at boot

I may be completely wrong, which is often the case, but this sounds like a kernel problem. I think the newer kernel supports atapi/ide drives. You may have to pass a command to the kernel at boot-time to use your scsi drive.

john

[SheeEttin]

Re: SCSI hangs or unrecognized at boot

When booting with the card in, go into the Grub menu, find the entry you're booting and hit E while it's selected. Next, find the "kernel" line, and again hit E. Go to the end of the line and remove "quiet splash" (or "splash quiet"). Hit enter, then hit B. Watch as everything goes by, and note what it says when it stops booting.

[ranxerox]

Re: SCSI hangs or unrecognized at boot

The instructions for setting grub to start with messages and no splash screen were certainly a magic cookie. Part of me feels like that should be really prominent (and I'm sure it is somewhere) and part of me feels like it wouldn't help a lot of people.

In my case I started seeing modprobe fail out:

udevd_event [1943]: run_program '/sbin/modprobe' abnormal exit<6>sis900.c v1.08.10 Apr. 2 2006

I saw SIS in other places. I'm using a used motherboard which apparently has a SIS900 ethernet controller. I had major issues with it when loading Knoppix 5.01 which I finally resolved. It was nice to find that Kubuntu just worked with the ethernet card.

Well, I guess it doesn't. Once I saw the SIS900 message I disabled the onboard LAN. No dice. Then I reinstalled with it disabled. At that point the install worked fine and the system booted with the SCSI drive properly configured (via the manual disk configuration) as /home.

I'm having other hardware issues, notably the dual head G400 I'm using, but that's for a different post.

If there is any more specific information I can post regarding this issue let me know. I'll keep checking back for a while.

Thanks!
Ranx

[SheeEttin]

Re: SCSI hangs or unrecognized at boot

If it's that much of a trouble, I'd recommend just going out to your local RadioShack and picking up an Ethernet card. It doesn't sound like it'll get resolved any time soon.

[ranxerox]

Re: SCSI hangs or unrecognized at boot

I have another ethernet card and it's already installed.

I thought I had this but it's not repeatable. Right now I can't get a boot at all. Depending on BIOS settings I get different failures in modprobe:

• [ehci_hcd]
• [scsi_transport_spi] (most prevalent)
• unspecified

It seems somehow timing related. Regardless, it always ends saying it blew up in sis_init_one ... [pata_sis]. Whatever that means.

I loaded an ancient laptop with Xubuntu tonight first try. This particular exercise, however, is leaving me pretty frustrated.

I would think it was the SCSI adapter card if it wasn't working just fine whenever I did get a boot.

Sigh.

[ranxerox]

Re: SCSI hangs or unrecognized at boot

Definitely intermittent aspects. Seems to work fine mostly except for two issues:

• Every time I boot it fails to fsck the SCSI drive I'm using for /home. I have to manually fsck and then <ctrl>-d out of the script at which point all is well.
• Sometimes it still won't boot but not repeatably.