Installing new SCSI driver in Dell Poweredge - a challenge?
hi all
Thanks for the helpful comments re: my LILO problem. I've temporarily
abandoned adding a SCSI drive from an old sparc station, and have got the
server booting properly again through LILO. Here's what I'm trying to do
though, if anyone has any ideas they'd be much appreciated.
The HDD is a 50pin SCSI drive from an old Sun sparc station (which was
running Debian also - and has linux & Sun partitions) - the old HDD does not
boot. What I'd like to do is install this drive into the newer Dell server
we have here at the Uni. The Dell server has an on-board SCSI Ultra-2
controller for two Seagate drives, and a separate PCI SCSI card for the DDS4
tape drive. This separate card has both an Ultra-2 channel and a separate
Fast/Ultra channel for older SCSI devices.
My basic plan of attack has been to install the old Sun HDD internally and
hook it up through the Ultra channel on the SCSI card. Everything's
terminated correctly, and at boot time the controller correctly identifies
the SCSI id and type of the old Sun HDD. The Sun disk is set at id 3, the
two Seagate drives are set at id's 0 and 1.
The problem is that the PCI SCSI controller initialises prior to the onboard
Ultra-2 controller (which controls the drive that I want the system to boot
off). This means that the old Sun HDD becomes /dev/sda, while the two
Seagate drives become /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc respectively. LILO is set up on
the Seagate HDD at id 0, and the config file tells LILO to look for the
kernel and root partition on "/dev/sda1".
If I boot the server with the old Sun HDD attached, I get a message along
the lines of "can't find boot device", if I take it out again, the Seagate
drive can't boot (it gets to "LI" and hangs). What I'd like to do is make
sure that the old Sun HDD is /dev/sdc - NOT /dev/sda - in which case the
machine should boot a-ok. However, for the life of me I can't get Linux to
recognise it as anything but /dev/sda. I've tried setting it's id to 0, and
the normal Seagate boot drive to 1 (and changed the SCSI controller to boot
from "1") - but this doesn't work either - the Sun disk is still /dev/sda.
I've also told the BIOS to give the on-board controller a higher boot
priority than the PCI SCSI controller - but this doesn't change Linux-world.
I realise know that it's probably the fact that the PCI SCSI controller
initialises before the on-board, meaning that the old Sun HDD is detected
before the two Seagate drives attached to the on-board controller.
I'm not sure if, and how, I can get the on-board controller to kick-in
first, meaning that my main system drive (SCSI id 0), is /dev/sda???
*Any* help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks
Andrew
-----------------------------------------
Andrew McRobert
LL.B B.Sc (Comp. Sci)
IT Liaison Officer
School of Law
Murdoch University
Ph: +61 8 9360 6479
Fax: +61 8 9310 6671
e-mail: a.mcrobert@murdoch.edu.au
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