Ancient SCSI HD Install


Forum: HD Install
Topic: Ancient SCSI HD Install
started by: Juanito

Posted by Juanito on Dec. 15 2006,15:39
I've been thinking about a DSL HD install on a 1997 vintage HP Kayak desktop. Before going through the pain (and cost of purchasing partition magic or similar) of partitioning the scsi HD (formatted NTFS), I've been testing things out using the DSL floppy/USB install.

After boot, it appears that DSL has not (automatically) found either of the two scsi HD or the two scsi CD drives. I can manually mount the HD as sdb1 and sdc1 & manually mount the CD as sr1 and sr2. The scsi controller is an Adaptec AIC-7880 integrated on the motherboard.

Given the above, is there any reason why DSL would not boot in a dual-boot setup? It would be difficult for me to partition the drives so that DSL is the first partition on a drive, would this be a problem?

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Dec. 15 2006,16:23
Can parted resize ntfs yet?

Quote
After boot, it appears that DSL has not (automatically) found either of the two scsi HD or the two scsi CD drives. I can manually mount the HD as sdb1 and sdc1 & manually mount the CD as sr1 and sr2.
What do you mean by that - can you explain this a bit more?

For a dual-boot setup - I don't see why not.  A problem may come up during installing the bootloader, but you won't know until you try :P

Posted by roberts on Dec. 15 2006,17:09
If you can manually mount the drives and cdroms that would imply that DSL has found and loaded the aic7xxx.o

There are quite a few scsi modules in DSL. I was using an acient aha1540 and am currently using a 2930. I have also used the first scsi card supported by liniux the ncr53c815.

If your scsi cdrom is not capable of booting then you become limited to only a boot floppy then you will have a subset of the supported boot time scsi modules. But then you can always open up minirt and add/delete for your particular requirements.

Posted by Juanito on Dec. 16 2006,08:14
Thanks for the suggestions - the aic7xxx module loads and I can read and copy from the drives so I guess I'm in good shape. Now to partition a drive...
Posted by Zucca on Dec. 19 2006,00:18
I have installed three SCSI HD's to my computer.
DSL loads aic7xxx.o but I cannot find those disks when the system has booted up.
SCSI id's for those disks are 0, 1, and 2. MY SCSI card has id 7.
I've tried to cfdisk /dev/sda ...sdb ...  and so on but without any result.
Any help? I belive this is  just something very simple but I haven't noticed it yet...

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Dec. 19 2006,00:32
Did you try fdisk -l ?
You could also check dmesg for possible errors.

Posted by Zucca on Dec. 19 2006,03:06
I checksed fdisk -l but not dmesg.
I'll check that soon.

Posted by Zucca on Dec. 19 2006,05:08
At least one onf the hard drives were damaged.
Now I replaced it with another one. (Lost 10Gb.)
Let's see if I get those three working...

EDIT: I still need to set jumpers to these new drives to setup SCSI termination. I'ts very late and I'll go to sleep. Maybe tomorrow.

Posted by Zucca on Dec. 19 2006,17:53
Problem solved.
There was one broken disk and one disk in an old SCSI bus that needs to be terminated manually.

Posted by Juanito on Feb. 05 2007,05:52
I managed to make this work with DSL 3.2 a few weeks ago so I thought I'd complete the post just to let others know it is possible.

Hardware: HP Kayak XU, 267Mhz Pentium II, 512MB RAM, 9GB+36GB scsi hd, floppy, ide cd (no longer bootable), scsi cd, scsi dvd, Matrox Millenium II agp graphics, Soundblaster 128 pci, HP built-in ethernet.

1. Since the machine will no longer boot from cd, I managed to boot from a floppy and use the "fromusb" option to continue the boot from a usb stick (sda1 - this is important, see step 5).

2. W2K boots from the 9GB hd, so I used ntfsprogs to shrink the single ntfs partition on the 36GB hd to 25GB - see < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....t=16815 >

3. I created 1GB ext2 swap, 2GB ext2 bootable and 8GB ext2 partitions in the space freed up on the 36GB hd which became sdc2, sdc3 & sdc4

4. Using a modified frugal_lilo script - see < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....t=17087 > - I created a frugal lilo boot file on sdc3

5. At this point sda1=usb stick, sdb1=W2K boot drive, sdc1=ntfs partition, sdc2=linux swap, sdc3=lilo boot partition, sdc4=linux partition but to boot from the lilo boot partition, the usb stick will be removed, so sdc3 becomes sdb3 on reboot - so I changed fromhd=/dev/sdc3 to sdb3 in lilo.conf

6. Finally, I changed the BIOS setting for which hd to boot from to the 36GB hd and it worked.

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