RE: need some background information

Carsten,

I don't know if this will be any help but maybe my situation will shed
some light. I have 3 PL2500 Pentium Pros and 1 PL2500 PII 333mhz. My PII
had always been a problem with kernel panics trying to install almost
any distribution of Linux. The only thing that would install was a bare
install of RedHat 6.1. Last night I finally got my hands on a
replacement processor but when I went to change it I noticed that the
switch settings on the system board were not set for a 333 MHz even
though the system was seeing 333. I change the switches to what the
documentation said was supposed to be 333 and now the system sees 210
MHz but no more problems. I don't know if there was a flaw in the PII
processor boards for the PL2500s or what.

Just my .02

Neil

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Carsten P. Gehrke
Sent: Monday, July 01, 2002 12:54 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [tomsrtbt] need some background information


Hi,

This is a question that Tom would probably be in the best position to 
answer, but if anyone else has any input, I'd appreciate that too.

I have a Compaq ProLiant 2500R which I recently upgraded from dual
Pentium 
Pros to dual Pentium II processors.  After the upgrade, my Linux 
installation will no longer work; the kernel panics because it cannot
mount 
the root file system.  The details of my system are:

Adaptec AHA-2940 controller with a 4.3 GB drive.  This is the boot
drive, 
and also the /tmp partition.

Compaq embedded SCSI controller (NCR53C875) with one 4.3 GB and four 9.1
GB 
hot-plug SCSI drives.  The 4.3 drive is home to /, /usr, /var, and
/usr/src.

Compaq SMART-2/P RAID controller with no drives attached yet.

1 GB RAM

So why am I writing to this list?  Well, I have used Tom's disk to boot 
this system in the past, so I naturally thought that I'd give it a try
when 
I had problems.  I got the latest version (2.0.103), and it boots fine,
but 
will not recognize the embedded Compaq controller, so I have no access
to 
/, /usr, etc.  I can access all partitions on the 4.3 GB drive attached
to 
the Adaptec controller.  After some searching, I found an older version
of 
Tom's disk (1.7.361), and tried it.  The old version has no problems
with 
any of the controllers, I can mount every partition, chroot, and try to 
rebuild my kernel.

But that is the main problem.  Regardless of the options I choose, I
cannot 
get the kernel to work with the controllers correctly.  The AIC-7xxx
driver 
has problems; it tries to probe every device ID, but fails (even on the
one 
drive that does exist).  The ncr53c875 (or sym53c875) driver does not 
complain, but I still get a kernel panic indicating that it can't mount
the 
root fs on 08:11 (which would be the correct major and minor numbers for

the root partition).  I have also tried to use the normal I/O option 
instead of memory-mapped I/O when building the kernel, but no luck.

So Tom, do you have any idea what might have changed between version 
1.7.361 and 2.0.103?  The kernel I am using is 2.4.16.  I am not using
any 
distribution, but have compiled all programs on this system from the 
sources.  It used to work just fine before I switched to the dual 
Pentium-II board.  Since I can work with the system using the 1.7.361 
version of tomsrtbt, I know that the hardware is supported by Linux in
some 
way.  I just need help finding out what I must do to get the kernel to 
recognize the SCSI controllers correctly.

TIA,
Carsten
========================================================================
                             Carsten P. Gehrke
                      mailto:[email protected]
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