Adaptec 2742AT EISA
 

I have an Adaptec AHA-2742AT on an Asus PCI/E P54NP4 (dual pentium, neptune chipset) motherboard (with latest BIOS).

I am installing SuSE 7.1. I can install just fine, but sometimes Xwindows gives me some trouble. I get this prompt:

(none) login:

when I type in name and password it loops me back to a login prompt. If I Crtl-Alt-Del to shut down and re-start, sometimes I get the (repair filesystem) login: prompt that doesn't mount the root volume, and makes me run FSCK manually. (I couldn't help but think... Safe Mode??)

Sometimes I get the LINUX login: prompt and I can log in to shell or console mode. If I run YAST and try to set up XFree86 it dumps me back to the menu.

I want to set this machine up to be a router / gateway to the internet from my home LAN, so having the SCSI controller that supports busmastering would really help. XWindows isn't absolutely necessary, but I want to run the firewall and the web server as well, the the GUI would be nice to have to manage all of that.

I checked SuSE's web site for the "hardware compatibility" list and it lists this controller as "undetermined" (I think all EISA versions were) I tried a 1542CF ISA controller, and the module failed to load. Does anyone know of any issues with this controller, or know where I can get a better driver for it? Or, does anyone know if the combination of the controller and that motherboard pose problems?

Please feel free to reply to me in e-mail.

Tim Walsh

P.S. The disk drive(s) are brand new, have less than 10-20 hours on them, and pass all diagnostics both in the controler, and on the diagnostic utility commonly used to generate error codes for RMA to the manufacturer. (I thought I'd mention that before getting a slough of "Have you tried another hard drive" responses)

Re: Adaptec 2742AT EISA
 

I don't really know SuSe, so I don't know if this is a common problem, but I'm figuring this machines hostname, probably by default, is set to Linux, so for some reason it seems to be forgetting its hostname, which could be rather indicative of all sorts of init screwups. A SuSe user will probably follow-up

More like SuSe doinked the install. Amnesiatic hostname sound like a software problem.

About the adaptec SCSI card. Its an old chipset thats been supported forever. One of my cards runs on the module it uses. ISA cards can be a pain to get set-up. From the command line, try:

modprobe aic7xxx

Then, if that errors, try adding "irq=x" where x is anything that isn't already used on /proc/interrupts

After that... uh, I'm going to have to look in my black book of SCSI voodoo.

Cheers,

Finegan