Newb to Linux, tried a couple of distros (CentOS and something else) a while back with no success, then had great results with Ubuntu 6 and 7.04 on plain vanilla old Pentium III boxes. LiveCD worked flawlessly and installed but ran kinda slow due to low end CPU's and minimal ram. But it made me really want to learn this beast, seems a really viable option to the windoze quagmire.

Decided to try Ubuntu 7.1 on an old HP XClass workstation I have with dual PIII 866 cpu's, a gig of ECC ram and dual 10K scsi drives on an Adaptec 29160 controller. This box had been running Windows 2003 server without problems. LiveCD won't boot, hangs at a text screen that seems to be trying to detect an IDE hard disk. The only IDE drive on this system is the CD.

Can anyone tell me if there is support for the Adaptec 29160 in Ubuntu, or do I have to get a driver somewhere? If so, how do I load that driver during setup? Is there an equivalent to the Windoze F6 during setup?

I searched Adaptec's website and found nothing on Ubuntu and googling it didn't help.

Thanks for any help.

As far as I know that should use the aic7xxx module. I would think it would be available during the install but may not. Not a Ubuntu user. Not sure how to load addtional modules. If one can load additional modules then it must be built based on the same kernel the install is using.

Brian

I haven't been able to solve this problem yet. The screen it hangs at says BusyBox v1.1.3 type help for a list of commands
(initramfs)

It just hangs there. Do I need to type a command here to load scsi module? I would have thought a common platform like adaptec's 29160 would be natively supported.

I am going to try the non-liveCd install today and see if I can make any headway with that.

No idea about loading external modules on Ubuntu.

Brian

I tried the non-LiveCD install and it seems that the problem is actually with the CD drive, at least I can't get past that. I find it odd that it can boot from the CD and start the install process, but then Ubuntu doesn't have a driver for this CD to continue the process. The CD is just a plain jane 48X CD reader and I've booted every version of windoze there is from it. I had the same problem but with a different error on a desktop machine I tried this on, that one had a current Sony DVD burner in it, that one worked OK when I put an old 32X Panasonic CD reader in it. Not stellar CD support it seems.

Is there somewhere on the install CD where other drivers might exist? What folders should I be looking in?

I run a hardware/software repair business. Sensing a possible opportunity with Linux since 90% of my customers who have been forced to take windoze Vista hate it. But if hardware support is so poor, this is not going to be viable at all.

Just in case anyone is interested, it seems to be the CD drive is known to be a problem. It is a Mitsumi FX4830T!B, even though it's just an IDE cd there seems to be lots of reports on google of people having the same problem I am having not just with Ubuntu. Seems damn strange because I can boot Windoze and LiveCD from it and install Windows from it, but not Linux. I can't find a linux driver for it or a resolution for the problem, other than junking the CD drive and putting something else in which I guess I will do next.