I have a mandrake server that has been running happily for months without going down. It runs on several ide hard disks.

I am building a server to replace it with scsi hard disks.

The new server consists of, an adaptec AHA-2940 Ultra/Ultra W scsi controller, IBM 36GB Ultra 160 IC35L036UWD210-0, IBM 9GB DDRS-39130W, 4.5GB Quantum Viking WSE.

That setup does work, I was going to install red hat on the server but once the install had finished I decided to install slack.

I have installed slack on another PC before, but it was running on ides.

The problem is that slack dosent pick up the scsi disks, I type fdisk /dev/sc(a b or c) and it says hard disk does not exist.

The disks are already partitioned from the red hat install. I want to install the os on the 4.5GB and leave the other two disks for storage.

Do I need to do something before running fdisk for it to pick up the disks.

Oh and its slackware 9.

Thanks,

Mike

Lol, I am soo stupid. I have fixed it now, I pressed F2 and booted adaptec.s. It has picked up all of the scsi disks and I am now on my way to installing slack on the server

I have come across an error during install. I got as far as selecting the packages, using the 'menu' option. Heres the following error;

<1> Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address f8rf13f81

There are some other errors following this like, stack and call trace.

oh dear,

ive ghosted slack 9.1 from ide to adaptec scsi,

booted ok from setup cd,

installed adaptec.s kernel and modules,

adjusted fstab and lilo,

result is reproducable boom on reboot:

messages:
modprobe block-major-8 error 2 (to what the hell module is that mapped to?)
cannot open root device 803
vfs couldnt mount root
append "root=" to kernel at boot (??? default failure message?)

full stop.
scsi aic7xxxx was not detected after ide devices...

strange to me is, the setup system from cd with adaptec.s kernel boots ok and detected all ok.

HAVE I MISSED SOME CONFIGURATION changes from ide to scsi (etc/files)?

thx for help,

tom

from scsi 2.4 howto:

Some boot parameters related to the SCSI subsystem:

single [enter single user mode]
<n> [enter run level <n> {0..6}]
root=/dev/sda6[*]
root=/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part6[*]
root=/dev/sd/c0b0t0u0p6[*]
devfs=mount [overrides CONFIG_DEVFS_MOUNT=n]
devfs=nomount [overrides CONFIG_DEVFS_MOUNT=y]
init=<command> [executes <command> rather than init]
quiet [reduce output to console during boot]
debug [increase output to console during boot]
nmi_watchdog=0 [turn off NMI watchdog on a SMP machine]
max_scsi_luns=1 [limits SCSI bus scans to lun==0]

root=/dev/sda3 worked for me
and added the aha2940 driver to modules.conf explicitly
alias block-major-8...
fine.