I added a second SCSI hard drive to a system with an Adaptec 7899 controller after installing the OS on the original drive but am having problems trying to partition the new drive and put a file system on it.

The Adaptec 7899 provides Ultra 160 to internat devices and Ultra Wide 2 to external devices (none attached). Both hard drives are Ultra 160s and are recognized as such by the BIOS and by RH during boot. The SCSI controller refers to the internal bus as Channel A and the extenal as Channel B. RH says it sees Ultra 160 hard drives on what it also calls Channels A and B. The only error, per se, in the logs is:

kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k scsi_hostadapter, errno = 2

I get this on every machine with a SCSI adapter that I have ever installed any version of RedHat on - doesn't seem to matter.

Farther down in the log, I see

Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi0, channel 0, id 1, lun 0
(scsi0:A:0): 160.000MB/s transfers (80.000MHz DT, offset 127, 16bit)
SCSI device sda: 35566478 512-byte hdwr sectors (18210 MB)
Partition check:
sda: sda1 sda2 sda3
(scsi0:A:1): 160.000MB/s transfers (80.000MHz DT, offset 127, 16bit)
SCSI device sdb: 71833096 512-byte hdwr sectors (36779 MB)
sdb: unknown partition table

By this point, RH seem to have things on the right adpater channel but doesn't like the sbb partition table.

I have tried parted but am confused. It says it doesn't recognize the disk label on sdb. The disk label is apparently different from the partition label. I want to make a single 36 GB ext3 partition that would be /sdb1 and want to mount it as /usr2. I have tried running a reinstallation but the install program doesn't see sdb. The RedHat hardware brower sees both sda and sdb.

Any help out there for the clueless?

I have managed to get things to the point of being able to do a reinstallation with the 2nd scsi included. I am not entirely sure how.

The parted documentation (man and RH booklet) leave much to be desired. Took a chance with mklabel and chose "bsd" as looking the closest to a linux partition. Turned out to be wrong but it helped.

Had to reboot to make any more progress. Then was able to do /sbin/mkfs primary ext3 0 35074.375, use e2label, and edit fstab. At this point the RH hardware browser saw the new partition but df reported totals that corresponded to sda and not sdb. Another reboot generated all sorts of messages about sdb including those complaining about a bsd ext3 partition. At this point, I booted the installer from CD. It also complained about the bsd partition but offerred to initialize it and did so successfully. This enabled me the use disk druid to set up and format the sdb partition.

Not pretty but it worked.

You didn't, by any chance, attempt to partition it using a command like ``fdisk /dev/sdb1'' did you? I've done that by mistake and wondered what the heck was wrong with the drive.

I don't think so but I can't be sure at this point. Had all sorts of problems with this and another machine recently and its all kinda blurry. Tried two drives before I realize that the original scis cable was not a U160 cable. The stuff I posted picks up from that point.

Dell likes to do stuff like that - have another Dell with an EIDE controller and disk that supports 133 MHz transfers but came with a 40-pin cable. The last workstation I bought did have an U160 cable, though.