Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 7104
6.1 installer rewrites SCSI BIOS settings for Ultrastore Ultra 34F controller
Last modified: 2015-01-07 18:39:44 EST
I have an old 486-66 that is (or rather, was) running Win95 just dandy. It has a VL-Bus motherboard and uses an Ultrastore Ultra 34F SCSI controller to connect 2 hard drives and a CD-ROM drive. The device IDs are: SCSI ID Device 0 Maxtor 7213 hard drive 1 Fujitsu M1606S-512 hard drive 6 Toshiba XM-5701TA CD-ROM drive 7 Ultrastore Ultra 34F VL-Bus SCSI controller When I attempted to boot Linux 6.1 from the boot diskette for the 1st time, the installer appears to have changed the SCSI bios settings so that device 0 is no longer found. With no primary hard drive found, the PC refuses to boot ... not Windows, not Linux from the boot floppy, not DOS from a DOS boot floppy ... nothing. I have the Ultrastore controller docs, and there's no way to get into the SCSI BIOS to restore the settings to factory defaults, or any other values, without first booting the PC. There's a DEBUG utility on the driver diskette, but you have to get a DOS prompt to run it so I'm out of luck. Suggestions? The system is totally unusable in its current state, which is clearly unacceptable.
I cannot imagine how the Red Hat installer would rewrite the SCSI BIOS that your card depends on, unless that BIOS information were stored in a file on the partitions that you installed Linux on, but that really does not make sense, as then the card would need to access the drive to find out about the drive and that just does not make sense. You say there is no other way to get to the BIOS of the card, other than running a Windoze application? About the only thing that I can recommend is that you boot the system into linux rescue mode (type "linux rescue" at the boot prompt) and then try to get access to the drive from there. I would also recommend checking the cables connecting the drives, as I have never seen an installation which was capable of rewriting BIOS information.
Closing bug due to lack of activity.