MILO and Adaptec AHA2940AU

[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

Hello Peter,

>Ok. To solve, do the following:
>  
>

Haha, very funny (sarcastic tone).

>If not: Maybe you can state your problem or at least leave it in the message?
>  
>

I thought anyone on this list would have access to the archives. If I 
had kept my entire original message in the reply, I would have had 
another person on the list tell me that I shouldn't repost with just one 
line added to the original message because I waste other people's 
bandwidth...

But anyways, since you ask, here goes... (I have a few less than optimal 
wokarounds, but I'd like to find out why the steps that other people say 
should solve the root problem don't work for me, since that would be the 
best thing...)

The following random bytes came from Jean-Sébastien Guay's keyboard :

> I want to install a new HDD in my Alpha XL-366 (XLT system type, 
> AlphaBIOS-only, so I'm stuck with MILO...). Now, the first problem is 
> that I can't run it off the onboard sym53c810 SCSI controller, because 
> (as I understand it) it is a Wide SCSI-2 device, and the sym53c810 
> only supports Fast SCSI-2, and the problem is that the kernel driver 
> tries to set the controller to Wide which causes errors to be 
> continuously printed to the console.
>
> (See 
> http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-alpha@lists.debian.org/msg22571.html 
> for a description of the exact same problem. That person solved it by 
> patching the kernel driver to turn off Wide mode, which is a bit 
> drastic and I don't want to do it each time I build my kernel...)
>
> So what I'm trying now is to run the drive off an Adaptec AHA2940AU 
> controller I had in another unused machine. The controller and drive 
> are detected on bootup, I see them in the BIOS, so all seems peachy. 
> But when MILO starts up and tries to detect the machine's devices 
> (after typing in a "boot" command, or when doing an "ls" for example), 
> it hangs right after detecting the Adaptec controller.
>
> See https://www.redhat.com/archives/axp-list/2002-August/msg00185.html 
> (first 1/3 of the message), where the same problem is described.
>
> First question is why does MILO 2.2-18 hang when loading the Adaptec 
> driver? Is it a known bug with this hardware/software combination?
>
> That person says that downgrading to MILO 2.2-17 allowed him to boot. 
> When I try that version, it hangs at "Swapping to PALcode at 
> 0x80080000". I even tried linload.exe version 1.3a and 1.5, both give 
> the same problem. How do I get MILO 2.2-17 to boot?
>
> Of course, if someone could tell me how to disable Wide mode in my 
> 2.6.11.8 kernel's sym53c8xx driver without having to hack the code at 
> each kernel upgrade, that would (probably) solve the root problem and 
> eliminate the need for the Adaptec controller. I saw that passing 
> 'sym53c8xx="wide:0"' to the kernel in the boot command would do the 
> trick, if the sym53c8xx driver were built as a module. But the 
> controller is needed to boot at all, so I have to compile it into the 
> kernel or else the kernel starts but doesn't see the root device, and 
> with the driver compiled into the kernel it doesn't check those 
> arguments (argh). One solution could be to install an IDE controller 
> with a small IDE drive to boot from, and then compile the sym53c8xx 
> driver as a module, but I'd like to keep that as a last resort and try 
> to make it work with what I have first.



-- 
___________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay   jean_seb at videotron.ca
             http://whitestar02.webhop.org/


-- 
___________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay   jean_seb at videotron.ca
             http://whitestar02.webhop.org/