the mb440lx has three (3) scsi chips on the motherboard: an
ncr53c810 narrow scsi and two ncr53c875 ultra scsi chips.

linux redhat-5.2-latest boots up cleanly from CD or floppy.
It goes
(quickly) through its installation process.  Then it detects
the scsi
chips.  It installs it's ncr53c8xx.o kernel module. the
module happily
finds the first disk on the first controller (the 810).
Then the
ncr53c8xx.o driver goes to initialize both of the other two
chips.

it goes into an endless loop, displaying the two lines at
the bottom of
this message forever.

i tried all the insmod options that might help from the
README.ncr53c8xx
file from the F2 console (your expert mode dialog box is way
too
small!).
on a different system, i gen'd a kernel with the latest
ncr53c8xx.o
driver built-in (not a module).  i booted to DOS, floppy
sneakernet'd
the kernel and loadlin.exe to the dos partition.  it
booted.  so now i
have a kernel that appears to work (2.0.36 with latest ncr
scsi driver).
i did a loadlin from dos and it appears not to hang.
however it panics
because there is no root partition.

how do i replace the redhat kernel on the redhat boot floppy
with my
working kernel?

i tried to unpack and re-pack the tomsrbt distribution but i
could not
figure out the loop mount weirdism.  i mounted the tomsrbt
floppy and
copied the files back. then i replaced tom's kernel with
mine; however i
did not lilo the floppy so the boot map was wrong and it
froze.

i tried to mount the redhat boot floppy to replace the
bzimage
and lilo the redhat boot floppy, but i could not read the
files on the
redhat boot floppy.

i can get to dos or NT on the scsi drive now.  i did a
loadlin and my
kernel loaded but panicked because it has no root
partition.  i put
umsdos in the kernel (not module) but even if i did copy the
redhat live
image from cd to a dos partition, how would i reformat the
hard drive to
how do i replace the redhat kernel on the redhat boot floppy
with my
working kernel?

i tried to unpack and re-pack the tomsrbt distribution but i
could not
figure out the loop mount weirdism.  i mounted the tomsrbt
floppy and
copied the files back. then i replaced tom's kernel with
mine; however i
did not lilo the floppy so the boot map was wrong and it
froze.

i tried to mount the redhat boot floppy to replace the
bzimage
and lilo the redhat boot floppy, but i could not read the
files on the
redhat boot floppy.

i can get to dos or NT on the scsi drive now.  i did a
loadlin and my
kernel loaded but panicked because it has no root
partition.  i put
umsdos in the kernel (not module) but even if i did copy the
redhat live
image from cd to a dos partition, how would i reformat the
hard drive to
get redhat on the machine natively?


Many thanks in advance,

-mitch          mfw            510.499.4663