[3180] in linux-scsi channel archive
Re: AHA1542CF suddenly stopped working! Help!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jay Vassos-Libove)
Tue Feb 3 09:35:01 1998
Date: Tue, 3 Feb 1998 09:25:33 -0500 (EST)
From: Jay Vassos-Libove <libove@felines.org>
Reply-To: Jay Vassos-Libove <libove@felines.org>
To: linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu, redhat-list@redhat.com
In-Reply-To: <199802030601.AAA16462@dledford.dialnet.net>
On Tue, 3 Feb 1998, Doug Ledford wrote:
> You mentioned that you added some more RAM...try reducing the amount of
> RAM back down to 16MB just for grins (I assume it's higher than that
> now). The card and driver should work with more than 16MB, but you never
> know......stranger things have happened in the past.....
The system had 32M before, so it is "breaking the 16M barrier" that did
it.
Sorry, last night I was in a BAD state, so I didn't give enough details.
Here are some more:
The only devices attached are/were disk drives. The kernel and boot
loader successfully loaded from the SCSI chain care of the BIOS on the
AHA1542CF card, so I don't think that hardware is the problem. I even
replaced the two drives that were there (and were working perfectly for
several days) with an older 307M SCSI drive which had an older copy of
Linux on it (same RedHat 5 distribution; this was the drive on which I'd
first installed the software to test it out) and it too would load the
boot loader and kernel from the SCSI chain, and get the same SCSI bus
screwup when the AHA1542 driver initialized.
The same error occurred when I booted an emergency kernel from floppy -
the same kernel as is on the hard drives on the chain.
I booted the distribution floppies in rescue mode, and it hung probing the
SCSI bus.
Another experiment: I booted a DOS 5.0 floppy, ran FDISK, wiped out the
Linux (NON-DOS) partitions, made a single primary full-size (307M) DOS
partition and made it bootable, rebooted the DOS floppy, formatted the
drive with system files, and ... oh, right, gotta do FDISK/MBR or else it
will still read the boot loader from Linux and load the kernel from the
middle of the disk where the DOS "format" didn't actually erase it :)
Okay, so I did FDISK/MBR and booted fine in to DOS.
As far as I'm concerned, this proves that the hardware is good, and that
the fault is something in the Linux kernel/driver.
Any suggestions, please? I'd really prefer to be using that Pentium
instead of the old 486 on which I'm now typing this message...
Thanks!
Jay Vassos-Libove libove@felines.org
+1 770 552 0543 home +1 404 705 2867 work
Roswell, GA 30075 U.S.A.
