I am loading Debian Linux on to an older PC to be used to run Asterisk.
PC is based on ASUS-P2B-DS mobo with 2 x PII 350Mhz CPU's, 256MB RAM
It has SCSI HDD and SCSI CDROM.

Initially I loaded Sarge, with Kernel 2.4.27 from CD. All worked OK, but didn't use 2 CPU's.

I tried to re-build the 2.4.27 Kernel to include SMP but got errors during the compile, so I decided to try 2.6.8.

I sucessfully built and installed the 2.6.8 Kernel, and both CPU's were detected. (First build I forgot to include SCSI support in the Kernel).

Now the system is running, but I cannot access the CD-ROM.

I see from DMESG that the AIC-7XXX (low-level SCSI) module starts and detects the HDD, but not the CD-ROM. I did include SCSI, SCSI HDD and SCSI CD-ROM support in the Kernel build.

When I boot in the older 2.4.27 Kernel, I see from DMESG that the AIC-7XXX module reports detecting both the HDD and the CD-ROM.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Kind Regards,
Mark

You might want to just try: And reboot into that kernel to see if everything works and what modules it is using. The precompiled Debian kernels support most anything. It may be possible that you inadvertantly left something out of your custom kernel configuration, but I wouldn't know what modules to tell you to add in.

Hi,

OK, great, so there is a SMP image on the CD - didn't know that. I can probably install and run that.

Out of curiosity I am still looking for the cause of my no-CD problem.

I notice that when the system boots, there are some error messages. These don't get shown when I do a dmesg.

Is the full startup text (with errors) available anywhere?

Kind Regards,
Mark