Adaptec AHA2940 SCSI Startup
 

I recently added an Adaptec AHA2940 SCSI card to my PC to which I connected an Atlas 18GB disk. On boot-up the BIOS was correctly installed and Mandrake Linux 10.1 started up correctly. However it did not detect the new card or disk. Checking on this site I found someone else had a similar problem and the solution quoted of executing the command "modprobe aic7xxx" also worked for me and I was then able to format and mount the disk sucessfully; I also made a suitable entry in /etc/fstab such that the disk would be mounted on reboot. However, on attempting to reboot the PC all references to the disk appeared to have vanished and indeed "fstab" had to be edited to remove the reference to "sda1" before it would restart. To enable the SCSI disk to be permanently added to the system, do I need to re-installed Mandrake Linux such that the requisite module and drivers are picked up, or is it possible to edit the "start-up" script to include the "modprobe" command? If it's the latter, which file should I be editing and whereabouts should I include the command.

I'm sure to those familiar with Linux this is very straightforward, but to a newbie such as myself it's a bit of mystery.

Just edit /etc/modprobe.preload and add the entry "aic7xxx" in it.

Thanks - your suggestion has worked perfectly! /etc/fstab was even updated as well during the start-up process!