INI 9400U and Fedora Core 3

[Angelo Machils]

Hello there!

I have an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ with the INI 9400u SCSI card. On this card 
there is only one device attached, a HP DLT4000 tape unit (2 HP DDS-3 
tape units are supposed to be added later). In my /var/log/messages file 
I keep seeing these entries:

Feb 21 12:56:41 imhotep kernel: sda: test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
Feb 21 12:56:41 imhotep kernel: sda: assuming drive cache: write through
Feb 21 12:56:43 imhotep kernel: sddr09: could not read card info
Feb 21 12:56:43 imhotep kernel: sddr09: could not read card info
Feb 21 12:56:43 imhotep kernel: sda: test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
Feb 21 12:56:43 imhotep kernel: sda: assuming drive cache: write through
Feb 21 12:56:45 imhotep kernel: sddr09: could not read card info
Feb 21 12:56:45 imhotep kernel: sddr09: could not read card info
Feb 21 12:56:45 imhotep kernel: sda: test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
Feb 21 12:56:45 imhotep kernel: sda: assuming drive cache: write through
Feb 21 12:56:47 imhotep kernel: sddr09: could not read card info
Feb 21 12:56:47 imhotep kernel: sddr09: could not read card info
Feb 21 12:56:47 imhotep kernel: sda: test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
Feb 21 12:56:47 imhotep kernel: sda: assuming drive cache: write through
Feb 21 12:56:49 imhotep kernel: sddr09: could not read card info
Feb 21 12:56:49 imhotep kernel: sddr09: could not read card info
Feb 21 12:56:49 imhotep kernel: sda: test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
Feb 21 12:56:49 imhotep kernel: sda: assuming drive cache: write through
Feb 21 12:56:51 imhotep kernel: sddr09: could not read card info
Feb 21 12:56:51 imhotep kernel: sddr09: could not read card info

An sda entry would mean there is a SCSI drive attached, but there is 
none. What is meant with sddr09 I have no idea! When I go into the BIOS 
of the card, it only sees the DLT drive.
The tape-unit works fine (I can backup and restore without faults), but 
the system keeps logging the above stated entries all the time the box 
is up. This means messages files polluted with these entries, an impact 
on the performance of the system and when I go to a text-only console 
the messages start to appear there, so there is no way I can do anything 
properly in the console.

The BIOS version of the card is 1.08 and I have tried the loadbios util 
to upgrade it to 1.15 with a bootable DOS floppy, with booting Win2K in 
DOS mode and from a DOS window in Win2K, but each time the util says 
there is no INI card on the pci bus.....

I have written to the tech help at Initio, but basicly they just say 
'it's a discontinued product, not tested under newer OS's, but it should 
work'. They also said I should load the driver (which seems to be 
standard in de FC3 distro) for each channel (there are 4 on the card), 
but how can I do this??

Thanks in advance for your help.

Kind regards, Angelo