SCSI (aic7xxx) and KDE
Ivan,
This may end up as 'off topic' as the worst thread so far. The situtaion is:
I was given a fantastic (early) Christmas present, and it's causing me more
gray hairs that I appreciate.
Is KDE involved, yes.
Is KDE at fault, I'm in doubt
This mail is going to be long, drawnout, and contain a shitpot of info. I
don't know how else I can get it all included. (shrug)
SYSTEM INFO:
Tyan ThunderBolt motherboard with current BIOS upgrade
Dual P3 750 cpu's
Onboard Adaptec AIC-7896 scsi bios V2.11
Western Digital WDE ULTRA3 ULTRA2-LVD (sda)
TDK CD-RW (hda & scd0)
Creative 8x DvD (hdb & scd1)
Kenwood True-X CD-ROM (hdc & scd2)
{The above devices are all seen as SCSI devices due to the SCSI emulation
required for the CD-RW}
IOMega internal 100 Zip (hdd)
{IDE FLOPPY support is enabled in the kernel to support the Zip}
Standard floppy
GForce2 MX 32 meg video card
512 meg RAM (256 x 2)
(Ch A, SCSI ID: 0 WDIGTL WDE18310 ULTRA3 ULTRA2-LVD - Hard Disk 0)
ERROR MESSAGE (captured, by hand)
scsi : aborting command due to timeout : pid 30523, scsi0, channel 0, id 0,
lun 0 Read (10) 00 01 ab d1 9d 00 00 08 00
SCSI hist 0 abort (pid 30522) timed out - resetting
SCSI bus is being reset for host 0 channel 0.
To date, the scsi bus has never reset correctly.
Upon startup of KDE2.x, the 'initialization' screen will freeze at the point
of 'INITIALIZING PERIFERALS'. The hard drive light will come on and stay on,
the machine will stop responding. A full power off/power on is required to
reboot. The machine will boot, post a message that the partition is corrupted
and ask me to either use CTRL D or roots' pass for maintanence. Running
e2fsck -b 8192 (or 8193) just gives me a repeat of the error stating it can't
find one of the .... clusters (? not the correct term, damnit!)
After reading thru the /usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/README.aic7xxx file, I
added an 'append="aic7xxx=panic_on_abort"' to the lilo.conf which helped, in
that I did NOT have a corruptd partition until after the fifth reboot.
I have successfully ran (for some time) BlackBox & FVWM without any errors
or complaints.
Today I finally was able to cause the same sort of behavior in
Enlightenment. It wasn't identical, but close. The drawback to this trouble
shooting is when I loose the partition, I LOOSE the partition. It's a full
reload. The only CD's I have to date are POTATO so I end up spending a number
of hours downloading to reinstall to the point where I can again begin
troubleshooting.
(Hendrik, yes I took yer advice and was going to build the CD's, but a
friend stopped by, and thinking he would assist, told dselect to erase the
downloaded files while I was on the phone to a client.}
I've gone thru a number of hours of google searches, and found an enourmous
amount of data on the aic7xxx chipset, and some of the earlier problems they
had with this chipset. But nothing seems to apply to what I'm experiencing.
Would KDE be causing these failures so quickly due to the amount of hd use
it has during 'startup'? I know we use a number of quick 'temp' files during
the startup procedure. (duder, i'm grasping at straws here) This machine run
Win2K (massive shudder) just fine. I've beat the hell outta it in Windon't
with a number of apps and have seti running on it now for six dayz while
defragmenting, scanning, moving, deleteing, etc and no errors.
I've used kernels from 2.2.17 up to 2.4.9.
I've enable smp, disabled smp, called it bad names, bribed it, etc. :--)
I've used POTATO, WOODY, and SID
Anyhow, you get the idea.
Does anyone have anything (urls, readme's, info, man pages, etc) that might
help me shed some light on what I'm battling against?
--
______________________________________________________________________________
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