Description of problem: Disk installer sees scsi zip drive as sda and scsi hard drives as sdb and sdc. Result is that it won't install Lilo on my hard drive so I must boot from a floppy. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Graphical install 2.Partition disk with Disk Druid or Fdisk (will get message that sda is invalid block device or something like that) 3.Hard drives will be partitioned but Lilo installation to mbr fails (will get message that sda is invalid media) 4.System hangs on reboot because there is no valid mbr so must use floppy to boot. Actual Results: Linux successfully installed but will only boot from floppy. Expected Results: Successful installation which boots from first hard drive. Additional info: My system is a SuperMicro P6DBE dual PII400 with 384MB RAM and an Advansys 3940U2W scsi controller with a Sony CD-RW and an IOmega zip drive on the UW channel and two 4GB IBM drives on the U2 channel. The problem is the installer insists on seeing the zip drive as the first hard drive and thus insists the mbr be place there. I got a successful install by removing the zip drive prior to installing Linux and re- attaching it following the install. It would be nice to have the ability to choose which device will have the mbr from the installer.
That's strange, because I have an internal zip in one of my test machines and have not seen this problem. However, mine is on the IDE bus and not the SCSI bus, so that probably makes the difference. After you've got the machine installed and reattached the device, what device does the kernel see the zip drive as? sda, sdb, or sdc?
It sees the zip as sda after I successfully install linux and reattach the drive. Since there is no boot disk in the zip drive the system skips it and boots off of the hard drive. One additional bit of information for what it's worth, my system uses software raid for all partitions except the swap and /boot. I suspect the root of the problem is that the system scans the UW SCSI bus first, where the zip is, and then scans the U2 SCSI bus, where the hard drives are. I don't know of any way to change this. However, it seems to me that linux should recognize that the mbr doesn't belong on the zip drive. It doesn't try to put it on the floppy or CDRW so why does it try to put it on the zip? It appears linux thinks the zip is a hard drive.
We don't have an internal SCSI zip drive. We have an external SCSI one, but I was not able to reproduce this behavior. It could be because there are two scsi busses in the computer. We don't really have a way of figuring out which SCSI bus should be the primary controller. I think that might be the root of the problem.
I've talked to the other developers and here's the situation. The kernel scans the PCI bus in ascending order. The first controller it finds is considered the primary controller, and that's what it installs to. You might try changing the bus order of the controllers in the bios, or changing their order inside the machine. Other than that, we don't really have a way of fixing the problem.