I know this question must have been asked tons of times before, but.....

I have a system running Red Hat 8.0. I just bought a SCSI card (QTec (Initio) 210S Fast-SCSI) and installed it inside the computer, hoping to get it to work with my scanner.

When I start up RH, kudzu auto-detects the SCSI controller, and startup goes on as normal. When I type: cat proc/scsi/scsi, there's nothing there.....! Does this mean the SCSI controller is somehow not recognised? Nothing scsi-like appears when I do a "lsmod" either.

Be gentle with me, this is the first time I've tried to add such hardware to my PC, and it's very painful......

Any helpful hands out there...?

artemis

what happens when you type

modprobe sd_mod?

Have you tried searching for your model of scsi card at www.google.com/linux ? You might be able to find some information about drivers there. Another great resource to search is www.google.com/groups someone might have had a problem with the scsi card you have before.

You might want to see if the scsi chain is detected right. If so you should have a listing something like this:

in "dmesg"

If it doesn't recognized a connected device, it probably just isn't jumpered properly... maybe. If its a true initio card (they market other cards, go figure) the module is probably either initio.o or... er, in2000 I think.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks for the fast responses! I'll check out my machine tonight to see what it says in dmesg and get back here....

I guess the other possibility is that the card hasn't been terminated properly..... does this sound plausible?!

Hardware newbie,
art

OK, I've checked dmesg and it does not appear to notice the SCSI card at all. Kudzu still picks it up however.

Unfortunately, whenever I try "insmod initio", the whole PC freezes and hangs, forcing a cold reboot.

Clueless art

gah... not good...

When SCSI is scanning the bus, the whole machine may seem to halt for a second, sure scared me when I first did it, but it finished in 3 seconds... so I figure that's not it.

Alright, need more info on the card: /sbin/lspci

and Paste in the scsi info here.

Cheers,

Finegan

OK, /sbin/lpci shows this:

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C693A/694x [Apollo PRO133x]
(rev c2)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C598/694x [Apollo MVP3/Pro133x
AGP]
00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C596 ISA [Mobile South] (rev
12)
00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586B PIPC Bus Master IDE
(rev 06)
00:07.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 08)
00:07.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C596 Power Management (rev 20)
00:11.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97] (rev 06)
00:14.0 SCSI storage controller: Initio Corporation INI-950 (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage LT Pro AGP-133
(rev dc)

So far so good. When I run kudzu, it detects the card, then adds this line to /etc/modules.conf:

alias scsi_hostadapter initio

But this caused the computer to freeze when I rebooted it and tried to restart. I had to remove the line to get it to boot up properly.

Then manually I did a ./modprobe initio.

191u: PCI Base: 0xEC00, IRQ=11, BIOS=0xFF00, SCSI ID=7
191u: Reset SCSI Bus
SCSI: aborting command due to timeout, pid 0, scsi 0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0,
inquiry 00 0 00 ff 00
SCSI host 0 abort (pid 0) timed out - resetting
SCSI bus is being reset for host 0 channel 0
Unable to reset - No SCB found
SCSI host 0 channel 0 reset (pid 0) timed out - trying harder

Then the computer freezes, and I need to do another cold reboot.

Results of modprobe -c
# Generated by modprobe -c (2.4.18)
path[boot]=/lib/modules/boot
path[toplevel]=/lib/modules/2.4.18-14
path[toplevel]=/lib/modules/2.4
path[kernel]=/lib/modules/kernel
path[fs]=/lib/modules/fs
path[net]=/lib/modules/net
path[scsi]=/lib/modules/scsi
path[block]=/lib/modules/block
....
....
alias ppp1 ppp
alias scsi_hostadapter off
alias slip0 slip
...
...

I don't know what else to do, apart from return the SCSI card. I've contacted the manufacturer's support but they have failed to get back to me.

At a loss!

Wow, that took a while, I found the I-950 on a the PCI device list in the bloody source code of the initio.o driver.. so its supposed to be what I thought it was... I wanted to double check kudzo which occasionally pulls a stupid. The hang is scary though. First I would think, check in the card BIOS on bootup to see that everything is kosher and all is happy and terminated. Really that's 9 of 10 SCSI issues, some of which WDoze compensates for in software so a lot of people jump on the "linux must be broke" when their card is acting funky after they've turned from the dark side. I use the same module, and nothing has changed in its behavior, so I'm not sure... if you can get a syslog or dmesg snippet during the hang, it might be worth mailing off to the driver maintainer...

Cheers,

Finegan

Well Imay have narrowed down the problem. When I disconnect the scanner from the computer and modprobe intio, it thinks for a while and then loads the module OK. Same thing happens when I modprobe sg.

cat proc/scsi/scsi then shows I have no attached devices to the SCSI bus.

So now I connect the scanner and switch it on - I've checked that it is terminated and set the SCSI ID to 6. Then I do this:

echo 'scsi add-single-device 0 0 6 0' > /proc/scsi/scsi

Then it shows me this message (can't remember exactly) before freezing up completely....
tul_ something.. c=0

When I try to modprobe initio (switched off but connected to the SCSI card), it freezes completely. Does the scanner termination occur physically or only when the scanner is switched on? If this is the case, can I narrow down the problem to either my SCSI card or the cable?


art

External devices like scanners I don't know, it should be terminated just by being plugged in and whether its on or not shouldn't matter... dunno, also don't sweat the echo line, scsi should detect the device at the right bus ID. I'm a bit perplexed, the initio cards are pretty rare, it could just be a buggy driver... maybe not. Probably best to take a look at the SCSI how-to, possibly. I just took a look at the source for the module and it doesn't seem to have been messed with in a while... like 3 years, which is far far too long. What I found at the Initio site was even older... aw heck. What can you sort out from the BIOS of the card?

Cheers,

Finegan

Well I didn't think the SCSI would detect it since I plugged in the scanner only after loading the initio module... I can't look into the card BIOS - how does one do so? It doesn't say anything in the manual - a useless little two-page pamphlet.

Looking through my scanner's manual again, it says it needs a HPDB50 cable connector. I have a DB50 connector. Is there a difference and could this be the problem?

artie

Doesn't your card interrupt the boot order, usually ctrl+B is what it'll display on the screen to get to the SCSI Bios.

A 50-pin cable is just a 50-pin cable, I can't image HP would have done anything peculiar to the cable...

Cheers,

Finegan

Is it really a DB50 or a 50-pin Centronics connector? The 50-pin Centronics is the hefty connector that has the wire clips on the female connection that secures the connector on the cable. It looks like a bigger cousin to the old parallel printer cables. I have a 50-pin-Centronics-to-DB25 cable that runs to my scanner. DB25-to-DB25 also seem to be common for connecting scanners. Too bad you can't post a picture of the connectors you're trying to mate.

I wouldn't put it past HP though to come up with something weird, though. Years ago I used to have a small box full of specialized RS-232 adapters just the serial interfaces on various pieces of HP equipment. (One for the plotter, one for the 9826, one for...)

I don't think they meant HPDB50 as in "Hewlett Packard"... I think the HP stands for something else (anyone know?)....? My connector is a micro DB-50 connector (male/male) which seems to fit into the scanner's socket quite well.

Oh well, I give up. I might just get a Windoze partition or a Windoze PC in order to do my scanning and Photoshopping. Drastic, perhaps, but I'm so fed up not being able to scan on my PC and the SCSI experiment proved to be expensive and futile.

"dmesg" does not show any evidence of SCSI cards detected on boot-up. And no, there is no option to ctrl-B to view the card BIOS....

Don't anyone buy QTec SCSI cards, their tech support are useless, 2 emails from me have remained unanswered.

artie

Oh, I know what they look like now. They have small clips that latch onto the connector on the back of the card. (They were sometimes a real bear to get unlatched.)
That's pretty wierd. I was having a devil of a time trying to get an aha1515 card to work. It was being ignored because it didn't like the IRQ (for some reason) but at least it was being detected.

Something else I just noticed. In an earlier post it sounded as though you didn't have the scanner powered up when you booted the system. You should always have all your SCSI peripherals powered up before the SCSI bus adapter is initialized. I wonder if that had anything to do with the card not being listed in /var/log/dmesg.
Too bad. Guess business is booming so they can afford to ignore the customers that have problems with their product.