DSL hangs at Probing SCSI aic7xxx.o

Sparc_Man · 08-06-2006, 08:44 AM

The story: I downloaded the DSL 3.0.1 ISO and ran it under VMWare. Booted up and ran fine. I used the Pendrive installer to load it onto a 128MB USB flashdrive and made a boot floppy for another, older system that lacks USB booting in the BIOS. The flashdrive with the floppy worked great. I took it home eager to try it on a newer system (an AMD Athlon x64) and set the BIOS to boot to USB. It started to boot fine, but hung on "Probing SCSI aic7xxx.o". I don't have any kind of SCSI card, let alone an Adaptec controller. I seem to recall having a similar issues with Knoppix. I was able to get around the hang with "dsl noscsi", but of course it then failed to continue reading the filesystem from USB. I dug around on the internet and it seems that numerous people have the same problem with knoppix and knoppix-based systems, but no one had any answers other than using "noscsi" or to remove the offending (or nonexistent in my case) Adaptec controller. So for anyone that has had the same issue, here is what I managed to figure out:

Start dsl in expert mode ("expert" at the boot prompt)
Next prompt is for which SCSI modules to load. USB is treated as SCSI so it may be overkill, but I loaded every USB module on the list (usbcore.o usb-ohci.o usb-uhci.o usb-storage.o)
I added a few more as a rough guess to make sure I had ATA/SATA and CDrom support (ehci-hdc.o initio.o ide-cd.o ide-scsi.o)
The next prompt is to load modules from floppy - you probably don't need to do this.
Next prompt is to change you keyboard type. Again, select n unless you know you need to change this.
After that it asks to set up your soundcard. If you want to set up sound, go ahead and select y and it will try to detect and configure your sound.
Next is your mouse config - the default should be autodetected so you're probably ok with selecting n
On the next prompt, it will ask if you want to configure X11. If you don't you will probably not be able to boot into the GUI until you run the xsetup.sh script.
After that, you should boot up into the GUI and be up and running.