First, some background...

I did a clean fresh base install of Woody 3.0rc1 2.4.18 and then dist-upgrade to sid. I installed module-init-tools and kernel-package. I then compiled the 2.6.5 kernel from the Debian source package. The compile and install went smoothly and things are reasonably stable.

The pc is a total SCSI system and I have two HBA's. I have an Adaptec AHAU2W and an LSIU160. I have my three hard drives on the LSI and my cdrom, cd burner, dvdrom and Zip drive are on the Adaptec and therein lies the problem... Linux scans the Adaptec HBA first and SDA is allocated to the Zip drive and I can't boot!

I ran into this problem during installation where my first hard drive appeared as SDB and through a newsgroup someone pointed to the problem with the Zip. To get by, I simply disconnected the Zip and proceeded with the install and everything went as expected... First hard drive SDA, second SDB etc. Now I would like to get the Zip working and find that proving to be a problem. The bios of the pc scans the bus with the LSI first and the Adaptec second, but when Linux 2.6.5 boots, it sees the Adaptec first and the LSI second...

The "old" 2.4.18 kernel "seemed" to work fine with a scsihosts boot option. I can't seem to get it working in 2.6.5? (I have to unplug the Zip again to boot!)

I've Googled and found some others with the same issues and there seems to be some confusion as to if scsihosts is still an option with the 2.6 kernels? Maybe I have to call it out differently? I use Lilo to boot and have this in my lilo.conf

append="scsihosts=sym53c8xx:aic7xxx"

Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas? Thanks in advance!