FC3 Install Problems with SCSI-Only Machine

[John William]

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