Hi,
i have just tryed to install fedora core 1 on an old server box, 2x pII300 | 1Gb | symbios scsi 53c876e. problem is when the install gets to lookup the scsi device (at install) it displays the correct device but then just hangs.

can anyone give me some helpful boot options that may get around this? or if any of you have a driver for fedora using the symbios chip (onboard) please give me a shout.

cheers,

spikes

It seems that this SCSI card is quite troublesome with linux. A quick google/groups.google search will show you this. Do you have another SCSI card that you can use? If not, try using the same machine with Knoppix, or some sort of "live cd" and see if you can get the card working properly that way. From what I have read, the redhat/fedora kernel may not have been configured to fully support this card. Try using a bootable cd to recognize the card, and if not, try another linux distro that you may have. Not one based on Redhat/Fedora though. Maybe debian, or slackware.

Hey,
Yea the card does seam to get a lot of stick from the community, unfortunatly i'm stuck with it at the moment. is there any way at boot time to give the system an alturnative driver and stop it from trying to use its own scsi driver (as this is where it hangs).

let me know,

spikes

I'm not sure if this is the same with Fedora, but with Redhat, at the initial boot prompt you can type "linux dd" and it will prompt you for a driver disk.

Yea just got the drivers in source from symbios. so i'll do the linux dd at the boot.
will it work if the drivers are in source format? if not how do i compile them to work with fedora (brief discription if you know, i'll check out the full process on monday)

cheers

spikes

Well, if you have an existing SMP Fedora box I would use that one to compile the drivers, and then copy them to a file. If you don't have a Fedora box, but have some other linux/unix you will have to be very careful to compile for the same architecture, and make sure to compile with static libs. If you use shared you will probably end up with unresolved symbols, or missing files. Your driver will be significantly larger if you compile static but it will probably work much easier. See if the driver has any documentation with it, and go from there. If you are compiling from a different architecture, IE: sparc64, this can be a bit more tricky, though not impossible.

nice!
have a good weekend dude

spikes

Hey All,
This post is closed, as i have gone and got a pci adaptec scsi card. yea see my other post in this forum, i have the same problem!

thanks for looking

spikes

Thread closed, as requested.