When installing RH LINUX 6.2 on a Compaq Alpha Personal Workstation 500a, the install program complains that it cannot find a valid device on which to create new filesystems. Apparently, it cannot recognize the Qlogic ISP1040B SCSI controller. This controller is embedded on the system board. Has anyone found a workaround or a patch of some kind to allow RH LINUX 6.2 to run on this machine? The instresting thing about this is that RH LINUX 5.2 installs and runs just fine.
We have the same problem with an HP NetServer 5/66 LC installing RH 6.2 and RH 7.0. The on-board SCSI adapter is an Adaptec AIC-7770 BIOS v2.1. We have successfully installed various versions of DOS, NetWare (3.x, 4.x, 5.x), Windows 95/98, WinNT 4.0, as well as UnixWare 2.1 and Caldera OpenLinux 2.4 with no problems. With RH 6.2 or RH 7.0 immediately after choosing the install type (server, workstation, custom) we get the error message -- cannot find a valid device on which to create new filesystems. We have tried all the suggestions in PID_121 -- AIC 7xxx chipset (Adaptec AHA-294x, Adaptec AHA-394x) -- to check all possible termination issues, disable sync negotiation and disconnect, disable extended BIOS translation for drives > 1 Gb, verifying SCSI ID 0, and reducing peak throughput to 5 Mb/sec. All variations work fine with the Caldera install, and none work with RH 6.2 or RH 7.0.
I can only speak for the Alpha 500a with the embedded QLogic ISP1040B SCSI controller. The following information came from COMPAQ's JumpStart! message forum.(www.linuxalpha.compaq.com/sourceforge/forum...) Thread subject:QLogic on Miata Hardware Issues. The install kernel of the RedHat 6.2 distribution is set to enable the generic PCI IDE chipset support which assigns teh IDE the same SCSI area in memory. This is why the install program cannot find a disk drive to load the system on. The fix I used to get around this was to use compaq's JumpStart! software to format the disk and run the install program. When the install was finished, I copied the JumpStart! kernel and System.map images to the freshly installed RedHat 6.2 system. Then rebuilt the kernel by running menuconfig and selecting "Block Devices" and unchecking "Generic PCI IDE chipset support". The details are at the URL described above.
Thanks to the additional comment from awm I swapped my IDE CD-ROM for a SCSI CD-ROM, and disabled the IDE interface in the system setup. Once that was done RH 7.0 install ran. :-)