Problems with a SCSI machine

I have a SCSI machine, a Pentium-3 with an Asus P2B-LS motherboard, with in-built Adaptec aic7890-91 Ultra2 SCSI adapter, and 2 SCSI disks, to which I have recently added a large IDE disk for archiving.

I've never been able to get any kernel that comes with any version of Fedora to boot on this machine. In fact, I think the last Redhat kernel that booted was RH-8.2 .

Since then I have been running a compiled kernel with SCSI built-in (as opposed to a module), and have upgraded to each distribution as it came along.

This has worked perfectly - But I'd like to have the possibility of installing Fedora instead of upgrading.

As far as I can see, there is no attempt to load the aic7love driver when I boot one of the distribution kernels (currently vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1368 plus 1FC4) even though I have -------------------------------- alias scsihostadaptor aic7love alias scsi-hostadaptor aic7love alias scsi aic7love # pre-install aic7love modprobe firstmodulename -------------------------------- inetc-modprobe.conf (and also inetc-modules.conf). It does not seem to make any difference if the last "pre-install" line is included.

I tried running "mkinitrd --with=aic7love initrd-2.6.11-1.1368 plus 1FC4.img 2.6.11-1.1368 plus 1FC4" and installing the new initrd. As far as I could see, the kernel did now install the aic7love module but it did not seem to look for the actual SCSI disks.

A couple of subsidiary questions:

(1) I tried sending the kernel logs to another machine, by adding a line toetc-syslog.conf , and while this worked when the machine was functioning properly (with compiled kernel) it didn't record anything before the panic with the distribution kernels. Nor was anything entered invar-log-messages on the machine itself.

Is there any other way of ensuring that any kernel messages are recorded ?

(2) Is there anything I can add to the grub entry for this kernel to ensure that the SCSI module is loaded?

Any suggestions or advice gratefully received.

-- Timothy Murphy tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland