Description of problem: The installation hangs at the point of initializing the AIC7XXX driver. I checked the Supermicro support site, and they mention that on earlier versions of Red Hat (I am running version 9 right now) you have to suppress the probing and explicitly load the old AIC7XXX driver. I think I recall doing this when I first installed Red Hat on this machine, but now I am running a kernel I compiled myself. "dmesg" tells me I am running the Adaptec AIC7XXX driver, Rev. 6.2.8, with no problem. That is my first problem. While at the Supermicro site, I ran into another note, that says Fedora 2 will not work on this board because of an AGP problem. If we can get past the SCSI problem I'll worry about that next. I would really like to run Fedora 2 on this system, and I'm tired of getting the warnings about my Red Hat 9 having dangerous security bugs. Any help would be appreciated. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: You need to have this motherboard, I guess. Otherwise, it happens every time I try to install from the Fedora 2 CD. Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Hangs at the point of AIC7XXX initialization, after printing a small block of garbage characters on the screen. Expected results: Normal installation. Additional info: Please feel free to e-mail me at baker.cs.fsu.edu, or call 850-644-5452.
loading AIC7XXX driver ... pause .... garbage message on screen ... hang garbage prints in text with diacritical marks, which I trascribe as follows: T(cedille beneath)3CU(tick beneath)AK3MEG(cirumflex above)u(u-shaped mark above)(space)(u-shaped mark above)z(dot above)G(cirumflex above)g(u-shaped mark above)l(u-shaped mark above)l(u-shaped mark above) This is on a Supermicro P3TDE6-G Motherboard that uses the ServerWorks HE-SL chipset, and has an onboard Adaptec AIC-7899 dual-channel Ultra 160 SCSI controller. I am currently running Red Hat 9 on this system (using it to type this message now), and would like to upgrade to Red Hat 6.0. When I boot with kernel 2.4-20-31.9 I have no problem: Oct 26 17:13:55 ada kernel: SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00 Oct 26 17:13:55 ada kernel: scsi0 : Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.8 Oct 26 17:13:55 ada kernel: <Adaptec aic7899 Ultra160 SCSI adapter> Oct 26 17:13:55 ada kernel: aic7899: Ultra160 Wide Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 32/253 SCBs Oct 26 17:13:55 ada kernel: Oct 26 17:13:55 ada kernel: scsi1 : Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.8 Oct 26 17:13:55 ada kernel: <Adaptec aic7899 Ultra160 SCSI adapter> Oct 26 17:13:55 ada kernel: aic7899: Ultra160 Wide Channel B, SCSI Id=7, 32/253 SCBs Oct 26 17:13:55 ada kernel: Oct 26 17:13:55 ada kernel: scsi2 : Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.8 Oct 26 17:13:55 ada kernel: <Adaptec 2902/04/10/15/20/30C SCSI adapter> Oct 26 17:13:55 ada kernel: aic7850: Single Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 3/253 SCBs I also compiled my own 2.6.9 kernel. It boots, with some complaints about various system components that need upgrading. It does not hang like the version on the install disk, but it does seem to pause quite a long time between the AIC7XXX messages, as if it might be timing out and then going on. I have not actually tested that kernel version yet with SCSI drives connected to the controllers. (In case you wonder why: I'm currently using only the two IDE drives as primaries for the old OS, planning ot keep the old OS on those drives as backup until the new install is working on the SCSI drives. Since the SCSI devices have priority for booting, if I plug them without an OS on them the system will not boot at all. I may be able to play with the BIOS settings to give the IDE priority, but my first attempt at this did not work. Here are the log messages: Oct 27 14:03:23 ada kernel: scsi0 : Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.36 Oct 27 14:03:23 ada kernel: <Adaptec aic7899 Ultra160 SCSI adapter> Oct 27 14:03:23 ada kernel: aic7899: Ultra160 Wide Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 32/253 SCBs Oct 27 14:03:23 ada kernel: Oct 27 14:03:23 ada kernel: scsi1 : Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.36 Oct 27 14:03:23 ada kernel: <Adaptec aic7899 Ultra160 SCSI adapter> Oct 27 14:03:23 ada kernel: aic7899: Ultra160 Wide Channel B, SCSI Id=7, 32/253 SCBs Oct 27 14:03:23 ada kernel: Oct 27 14:03:23 ada kernel: scsi2 : Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.36 Oct 27 14:03:23 ada kernel: <Adaptec 2902/04/10/15/20C/30C SCSI adapter> Oct 27 14:03:23 ada kernel: aic7850: Single Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 3/253 SCBs
ooops! I meant "Fedora 2", not "Red Hat 6.0" .... don't know what gremlin got into my fingers...
I modified the BIOS boot configuration and got the system running with kernel 2.6, and have successfully written data to filesystems on the SCSI disks. So, there is no problem with this board and kernel 2.6.9 the new AIC7XXX driver itself on this platform. The problem is in whatever is on the Fedora 2 distribution disks. I'm including the AIC7XX portion of .config for reference CONFIG_SCSI_AIC7XXX=y CONFIG_AIC7XXX_CMDS_PER_DEVICE=253 CONFIG_AIC7XXX_RESET_DELAY_MS=15000 CONFIG_AIC7XXX_DEBUG_ENABLE=y CONFIG_AIC7XXX_DEBUG_MASK=0 CONFIG_AIC7XXX_REG_PRETTY_PRINT=y # CONFIG_SCSI_AIC7XXX_OLD is not set Should I try to hack new Fedora installation disks using my own kernel?.... --Ted Baker PS: You may ask why I want to use the Fedora install disks, if I already have a working system with kernel 2.6 and yum updates. The answer is that this installation is getting very cluttered with legacy junk. I wanted to start fresh with the new distribution and new disks. If I try to keep this patched-up thing going I will also need to recompile and install a bunch of things that are not working quite right with 2.6, and risk along the way crashing and corrupting something.
is this still a problem with FC3 ? There's a 2.6.9 based update about to go into FC2, but that doesn't really help you wrt installation, hence my question.
The problem has evolved with FC3. That is, I made the FC3 DVD and was able to boot with it. The install worked, more or less. (That is, it crashed every time I tried to specify a different disk order for the grub installation, so I had to install grub on the drive that it wanted, but then the system would not boot at all. I booted with the recovery disk, and ran grub-install by hand to correct the problem.) I ran into bigger problems later, when I tried to boot the installed system, though. It hangs at the system initialization stage where it has just printed out "Initializing hardware ... storage network" I have to use the hardware reset switch, and boot using my old system image on the other drives. That is I now managed to put an FC image on two of my disk drives, which I had reserved for that, but I can't run the new system image. I'm still using the old disk drives as I write this message... the Red Hat 9.0 system.
Fedora Core 2 has now reached end of life, and no further updates will be provided by Red Hat. The Fedora legacy project will be producing further kernel updates for security problems only. If this bug has not been fixed in the latest Fedora Core 2 update kernel, please try to reproduce it under Fedora Core 3, and reopen if necessary, changing the product version accordingly. Thank you.