I would like to report a problem that has made it extremely difficult for me to install mandrake 10.0.
I started experimenting with the early pre-beta releases and had trouble immediately.

When the installer got to the part where the bootloader was installed, mkinitrd always failed.

I tried a later release, same problem.

After a few weeks of banging on things, installing fresh, upgrading from 9.2 or 9.1 I finally got a bootable 10.0 beta setup which did not work quite 100 percent, but enough to keep me happy.

On Saturday I decided to risk installing the community version.
I continued untill Sunday night with the same problem, mkinitrd always failed.

Today (Monday) I tried something new. I removed my pci SIIG AP-10 SCSI card and installed again.
Smooth, no problem.

I believe this card was recognized by mandrake 9.1 and possibly by 9.2 as an initio 940 or 910 scsi card.
I remember having trouble with this card when I was trying to install (compile) a 2.6.0 kernel with mandrake 9.2, which is why I decided to remove for the last installation of mandrake 10.

Ok, great, I am trying hard not to be a newbie anymore (this has taken me years).
I have no experience patching things like drivers or kernels.

Can someone please take some time and explain to me the step by step process of how I can get this card working in my now installed mandrake 10?

Question… does the initio 9100 driver work for this card?
I have downloaded an old linux driver for this card but it has xxx.h and xxx.c and maybe xxxx.lib parts and I do not know what to do with it.

Thanks.
Waz.

Hi,

I hope this could help but I am no expert:

Try to recompile your driver. You have .h and .c file. Maybe you have a 'makefile' and all the source code to build the driver (module xxx.o) , make ... see the makefile
if you do get to build a module, try loading it , insmod ...

Once this works, try to make a new initrd from the command line. Try to find the call to mkinitrd into the install script to get a look at the options the command is given.

In all commands used above into a terminal, try to see if a -v option can be used to see why for example the mkinitrd fails

Yves.

Thanks Yves,

Yes, I do have a ini9100.c file (under the filetypes, konqueror says it is a SOURCE file ).
And I have ini9100.h, which konqueror says is a header file.
There is a file called ini9100.lib that is of unknown type. I wonder if this is the driver? Should I try to insmod this?
I'll check on google to see if this makes sense.

There is no makefile unfortunately.

Your help is much apreciated and is at a level I can follow providing I have a source for information, like a book or the internet.
Guess I am in luck!

Many thanks.

Waz

Hi,

I suppose that the .lib is something proprietary that is used to compile the driver. Drivers (modules) are something .o or .o.gz like for example ini9100.o or ini9100.o.gz

I could not help more. I have no idea how you could build a driver without all he sources for the kernel. I suppose that the .lib is not good for the purpose you have MDK10.

I have tried to compile a driver out of a 2.4.x source code with the 2.6.x kernel code for a SCSI driver but I could not. There where to many changes in the kernel for me.

Good luck.