FC3 Install Problems with SCSI-Only Machine

[Edward]

John William wrote:

> Can someone help me figure out what's going wrong with a FC3 upgrade?
> 
> I have a machine currently running RH9 and I'm trying to upgrade it to 
> FC3. The machine cannot boot from CDROM (BIOS is too old), so I use 
> "memdisk" to boot from hard drive images. I have copied all 4 .iso 
> images and diskboot.img to a directory on the RH9 machine. I verified 
> the MD5 checksums and all images are good. The machine is not 
> overclocked and has been running various flavors of RH for 4+ years 
> 24/7, so I don't think it has any hardware problems.
> 
> Here is what I tried to get FC3 installed,
> 
> 1) Tried using memdisk to directly boot diskboot.img. The machine 
> completely freezes with a blank screen - no text, no nothing.
> 2) Tried extracting CDROM #1 to a folder and booting from the isolinux 
> directory, with kernel=vmlinuz and initrd=initrd.img. Everything boots 
> up ok, but it appears the module for the computer's SCSI card is not 
> loaded (when I try and install from CDROM or a hard drive image, I get 
> the "no devices found, add driver or use driver disk"). It's an AM53C974 
> chipset and uses the tmscsim driver. The tmscsim driver isn't on the 
> driver list, and I can't figure out any way to force it to install.
> 3) Tried extracting the rescue CD image to a directory. Everything else 
> went exactly the same as above (#2).
> 4) Tried using the FC2 diskboot.img. Immediately after booting into the 
> kernel I get "Could not find ramdisk image:" endlessly scrolling down 
> the console until I reboot.
> 5) Tried using the FC1 bootdisk.img on floppy. Kernel panic on boot 
> disk, but I didn't even bother to copy it down.
> 
> The machine is SCSI only - no IDE devices. My best guess at what's going 
> on is that the tmscsim driver is not being loaded so the kernel can't 
> find the HD. Since the tmscsim driver is included with FC3 (it's in 
> /lib/modules on another FC3 machine) I don't know what the problem is. I 
> guess it's possible that the AMD SCSI chip has a PCI id that doesn't 
> match the list for the tmscsim driver.
> 
> I read some earlier messages about problems with FC2 and machines that 
> need the tmscsim driver, but I thought they had been resolved.
> 
> My lspci -vvv for the SCSI controller is:
> 
> 00:04.0 SCSI storage controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] 53c974 
> [PCscsi] (rev 02)
>        Control: I/O+ Mem- BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- 
> ParErr+ Stepping+ SERR+ FastB2B-
>        Status: Cap- 66Mhz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr+ DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- 
> <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR+
>        Latency: 0
>        Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 10
>        Region 0: I/O ports at ff00 [size=128]
> 
> Does anyone have any sugestions?
> 
> - John

In the install, just before it gets to the hard drive stuff, I used to 
have to switch to a separate console that had a bash prompt and type in 
the modprobe command relevant to my scsi card. I think you then also 
have to modprobe sg (scsi generic?) module, then you should be good to go.

Regards,
Ed.