SCSI problems installing Debian linux on Motorola MVME2400

[David Sankey <D.P.C.Sankey@rl.ac.uk>]

Back in July I first played with installing Debian linux (potato) on a
Motorola MVME2400, when things proceeded without a hitch.

I'm now revisiting this for real and things are going disastrously wrong, in
that it no longer seems to be recognising my SCSI disk...

The situation now when I boot from
ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian2.2r2/main/disks-powerpc/current/prep/bootfull.bin 
is:

ncr53c8xx: at PCI bus 0, device 16, function 0
ncr53c8xx: 53c825a detected
ncr53c825a-0: rev 0x14 on pci bus 0 device 16 function 0 irq 25
ncr53c825a-0: ID 7, Fast-10, Parity Checking
scsi0 : ncr53c8xx-3.4.1-20000726
scsi : 1 host.
scsi : aborting command due to timeout : pid 0, scsi0, channel 0, id 0,
lun 0 Te
st Unit Ready 00 00 00 00 00
ncr53c8xx_abort: pid=0 serial_number=1 serial_number_at_timeout=1


When I boot from the bootfull.bin that I picked up in July the story is:

ncr53c8xx: at PCI bus 0, device 16, function 0
ncr53c8xx: 53c825a detected
ncr53c825a-0: rev=0x14, base=0x2ff7eb00, io_port=0xff7de00, irq=25
ncr53c825a-0: ID 7, Fast-10, Parity Checking
ncr53c825a-0: on-chip RAM at 0x2ff7d000
ncr53c825a-0: restart (scsi reset).
ncr53c825a-0: Downloading SCSI SCRIPTS.
scsi0 : ncr53c8xx - version 3.2a-2
scsi : 1 host.
  Vendor: IBM       Model: DNES-309170W      Rev: SA30
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 03
Detected scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
ncr53c825a-0-<0,0>: tagged command queue depth set to 4
scsi : detected 1 SCSI disk total.
ncr53c825a-0-<0,*>: FAST-5 WIDE SCSI 10.0 MB/s (200 ns, offset 8)
SCSI device sda: hdwr sector= 512 bytes. Sectors= 17916240 [8748 MB]
[8.7 GB]
pcnet32.c: PCI bios is present, checking for devices...
eth0: DC21143 at 0xff7df80 (PCI bus 0, device 14), h/w address
08:00:3e:2d:e5:94
,
      and requires IRQ18 (provided by PCI BIOS).
de4x5.c:V0.544 1999/5/8 davies@maniac.ultranet.com
Partition check:
 sda: sda1 sda2 sda3
etc

Unfortunately when I try to run the installation process it picks up
the newer version so then fails in the same fashion when I reboot from
disk.

To me it looks like the newer SCSI support is broken.  Anyone got any
ideas how to circumvent this?

                                     Dave