Hi all,

I'm having problems booting my new installation of Fedora Core 3 on my PC with a SCSI card. The card in question is an Adaptec AVA-1505 and the Fedora OS loader recognizes it fine when it is loading up the fresh install on the device. Unfortunately at the end of the new OS load onto the drive the installer tells me to reboot the system and at that point I get a "missing operating system" failure from my BIOS. The BIOS is configured to boot from the "bootable SCSI card" but it just can't seem to find the OS. Does anybody have any hints? Thanks for the help.

-- chris

I don't think this has anything to do with your linux installation. I don't know this for sure, but I think fedora uses the grub boot loader. It should start by telling you that it is loading "stage 2", and then you would see a menu.

If this doesn't sound familiar, then I don't think the boot process is quite getting to your drive's MBR. You may need to further configure your hardware. I have seen some cards that have a seperate pre-boot setup menu. Your's may not have this, but the point is, there may be something that you have overlooked.

If you're certain that your card can boot as is, then maybe the MBR didn't get changed by the setup process. This could have happened for one of many reasons. The only rational reason I could see for that would be if you have "virus protection" set to 'yes' in your BIOS setup. In this case you might need to use the rescue feature of your CD (or fix grub from a live CD such as knoppix).

OK, After reading some info on the SCSI card I have it seems as though my problem is that the card has no on-board BIOS to "help" with the boot sequence. The easy way out of this would be to go out and buy a new card which has BIOS on it or just go with an IDE drive.... On the other hand, I have a nice 10 GB SCSI drive here already and a good card (albeit with no BIOS) and don't really want to buy anything new. Is there any way to load some sort or preliminary tool on a floppy or a CD ROM which will then allow me to load the SCSI drivers and boot Linux from the SCSI drive? I know this is going out on a limb here but what the heck, I like the challenge!

-- chris

Challenge is right!

Yes, it can be done. I have never done anything quite that complicated, but I have a basic understanding.

You would start with a bootable floppy that has a linux boot loader on it, such as GRUB. If you're lucky, Grub might be able to read the drive, and load the kernel. I know this isn't always possible with scsi cards, but maybe it is with some of them.

If that doesn't work, then you will need to put your kernel on the floppy along with a customized initrd.

The initrd file is a compressed ramdisk image. The most common use is to store some drivers that the kernel might need before it can mount the root partition. You will need the mkinitrd tools. Use these to put your scsi controller module into the initrd (and the script that loads it, I think this is done for you).

You will likely need a live CD such as knoppix to set this up. If you don't know already, read up on chroot. It can be useful to get at a non-booting system.

OK gd2shoe, I'll try this out and see if it works. Thanks for the tip.

-- chris