Re: How to make SCSI only bootup
Quoting zdrysdal@diagnostic.co.nz (zdrysdal@diagnostic.co.nz):
>
> i have a SCSI only system and i am not too sure how to load the drivers for
> it to enable it to boot up. I have specified the SCSI disk to be the boot
> disk and it has written the boot/lilo onto it which is good, but when i
> boot the machine i only get 2FA:
I'll come back to this.
> I presume the SCSI disk needs the drivers loaded in order to make it
> boot/run.. but the drivers cannot be loaded because they are stored on the
> SCSI :)
This isn't really an OS issue. The installation kernels are stuffed with
SCSI drivers. If you've built your own, you've presumably built in the
correct drivers. If you haven't, you'll get a kernel panic after it's
detected all the hardware, when it tries to mount the root filesystem,
i.e. before/instead of:
Partition check:
sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4
hda: hda1
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
> Load the system via floppy which has the SCSI controller on it?
This is worth doing just to convince yourself that the kernel on the
floppy does have all the correct drivers included.
> what other alternative is there to make the SCSI boot up without the need
> of a floppy?
The BIOS needs to be able to read from the boot device without any
assistance from linux. If you're getting 2FA, then that task is done.
Now lilo needs to read the kernel from the partition where it has been
told it is. I think that's what's failing.
The causes are varied, I believe. If you boot up with a floppy, keep
a copy of /etc/lilo.conf and edit this file (remembering to run lilo
each time before you reboot without the floppy), you should be able
to fix it.
If you're lucky, however, you might find it's as simple as marking the
approriate partition active. That didn't work for me, but I've seen
others report it as a solution.
What worked for *me* in this instance was putting linear in lilo.conf
and changing boot=/dev/hda2 to boot=/dev/hda . This puts lilo in the
master boot record of the disk instead of the boot sector of the
2nd partition. (You'll be using sd, not hd, and maybe a different
partition number.)
Much later, I found that I could revert to the previous settings if
the firmware of the disk was not set to "block mode 16
sectors/interrupt" at address 59. That's on an IDE disk - I don't know
about these things on SCSI disks (where I've never had these problems).
Cheers,
--
Email: d.wright@open.ac.uk Tel: +44 1908 653 739 Fax: +44 1908 655 151
Snail: David Wright, Earth Science Dept., Milton Keynes, England, MK7 6AA
Disclaimer: These addresses are only for reaching me, and do not signify
official stationery. Views expressed here are either my own or plagiarised.
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