Member Avatar for spikes

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

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Brief, practical addendum for the Symbios 53c876e hang during a Fedora Core 1 install. This pulls together steps that build on ’s suggestion to use the installer’s driver-disk facility and on ’ note about having vendor sources available.

Start with hardware basics first. Verify the SCSI chain (proper termination, unique SCSI IDs, good cables and connectors) and try the card in a different PCI slot if possible. A stuck SCSI bus is frequently caused by wiring/termination or a firmware/BIOS setting, so check for an HBA option in the motherboard BIOS and look for any firmware updates from the board/vendor.

If you plan to supply the vendor driver during install, prepare it on a matching build environment. Use a machine with the same CPU architecture and the exact kernel headers/kernel-devel that the installer is running, compile the vendor source into a kernel module, and place the resulting module into the usual module tree (/lib/modules/<kernel-version>/...). Run module dependency generation so the installer can resolve it, then package that tree onto the small image the installer expects and load it with the installer’s driver-disk facility. The critical point: the module must be built for the exact kernel version and architecture the installer uses; mismatches cause unresolved symbols and hard-to-debug failures.

For debugging, boot a live/rescue image that contains SCSI support and inspect kernel messages to see whether the controller is being recognized or whether the kernel errors out. That helps separate a driver problem from a hardware/termination one. If building the driver isn’t practical and testing shows the card is the issue, replacing the adapter with a model that has in-kernel Linux support is the most reliable fallback. When asking for further help, include the installer kernel version and any kernel log output and people can provide targeted commands and an exact build checklist.

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Member Avatar for i686-linux

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.

Member Avatar for spikes

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

Member Avatar for i686-linux

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.

Member Avatar for spikes

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

Member Avatar for i686-linux

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.

Member Avatar for spikes

nice!
have a good weekend dude

spikes

Member Avatar for 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

Member Avatar for DMR

Thread closed, as requested.

:)

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