Adaptec 2400a Problems - Crashes/Unstable
 

I am a Linux semi-n00b (not a lot of installation experience but more usage/admin on the clock).

Built the following at home: Dual P3-S 1266MHz, Gigabyte 6VTXD, 640MB PC133 ... and Adaptec 2400a with 2 Hitachi 7K250 250GB drives attached, both set as master on seperate channels. Setup the drives as a RAID-1 in the BIOS and all seems ok...

I was first trying to deploy ClarkConnect which is based off CentOS, I was able to install it and it seemed to be running fine until I tried to use Samba to copy large iso images of DVDs over to the box, it would never complete the transfer and cause the server to lock up, stop responding... There was no pattern to how long the transfer would keep going, it would just terminate randomly and then I would lose connectivity to the box and have to restart it, altho I would still have some limited response from the machine if I plugged a monitor on to it (CC has very little showing though anyway).

Frustrated with this and the limited nature of the CC distro I thought I would go to Cent-OS.

Downloaded 4.4 and started to install... first attempt stopped copying files on disc 3 altho the button for release notes still worked and mouse pointer moved... second attempt failed after the file system formatting stage and never copied any files (discs are freshly burned and checked out fine btw).

I used simple partitions: 100MB boot, 1280MB swap and the rest of the space as /.

It seems that intensive hard disk activity causes problems (I plan to whack on a Windows later and see if this is a Linux only issue or not). I have checked both drives with the Hitachi tools and they are ok, I have flashed the 2400a to latest everything, all the other hardware seems to pass diagnostics perfectly well.

Nearest thing I can find to anything like my problem is at the bottom of this link, I know its about Suse but it got me wondering as I have seen the drives showing as /dev/sda and /dev/i2o at different times... which seemed odd.

whocares.de/category/linux/page/2/

Can anyone give me any guidance on diagnosing what is going on, or suggest any fixes? Thank you in advance... :scratch: