Hello,

I am running Slackware 8.1, and someone gave me an AHA2940 SCSI controller and a 9Gb SCSI drive. I have physically installed it and I am able to enter the SCSI BIOS. I assume I have installed it correctly.

My challenge is finding out what I should do next to get Slackware to recognize my drive. When I enter cfdisk, my new hard drive is nowhere to be seen.

I've also tried mounting all sda[x] drives, unsuccesfully.

I looked for drivers to install, and I couldn't find any except for something called aicxxxx and a scsi.gz file. I umcompressed the scsi.gz file and ended up with a scsi.h, and a scsi.c.

I think the next step is to recompile the kernel, which I have never done. I've compiled other things such as the new apache server and such... but I suspect this is different since I must include the drivers for the scsi card.

Or, perhaps there are prepackaged drivers for SCSI, or Slackware already comes with support for my SCSI controller. Unfortunately when I looked at the drivers that were included with the package I did not find mine. I also went to the adaptec site and found Unixware drivers, but no Slackware or plain linux drivers.

If anyone can help me I'd really appreciate it. Also, my card may be 2490 as opposed to 2940. Yet my question remains the same, should I be able to find drivers, or will I need to compile, and how do I do so?

Thanks,

Robert.

Try the command "modprobe aic7xxx"

If no errors are reported then try "dmesg"
I think it sould report at the very end what it scaned from the SCSI bus.

You should then be able to "cfdisk /dev/sda" as desired.

That was the perfect solution, and it worked immediately.

Thanks!

Now, to get my computer to mount it everytime, I need to modify my /etc/fstab correct?

and one more.

How do I get lilo to dual boot with Slackware on the primary partition and FreeBSD on the SCSI partition?

liloconfig doesn't give me the option of adding a boot partition from sda.

Without dual boot, I am stuck having to use bootdisks for FreeBSD or worse, changing the boot disk on my BIOS setup everytime I want to use a different disk.

(Some people may ask why I want both Slackware and FreeBSD on the same computer... the answer is that I want to learn both, and to understand what is so great about ports.)

So far I like Slackware much better since it is what I started out with.

Robert.

I would think that a line in the fstab for mounting the disk partition would be correct provided the module has been loaded. I reviewed the rc.S script and it appears that the mount command is performed prior to calling the rc.modules file. Simply duplicate one of the lines in the /etc/fstab to mount it on the mount point desired. It is still a good idea to have it there. You will find a modprobe command for the aic7xxx module in the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file. Simply remove the hash in front of the command to enable it. But I would suggest adding a line to the /etc/rc.d/rc.local file to mount the partition.

For your second question. Add another section to your /etc/lilo.conf file something like below. Since you described the disk as being bootable through the BIOS perhaps the easiest would be to handle it like a DOS partition.

other = /dev/sda1 (or /dev/sda)
label = FreeBSD

You will also need to make sure you have "delay = 50" type of statement to allow time for you to select the desired OS. After you modify the file, you will need to run "lilo" to write the new boot record. I think the SCSI module will need to be loaded in order for lilo to determine the drive number assignments so it will understand the device sda. If it doesn't work then post back. Somebody else might know more about booting FreeBSD on a different disk using lilo.

maybe you could add the line into your /etc/rc.local to mount it?

mount /dev/sda /mntpoint

rc.local is the last thing that's run, so the modules would definately be loaded by then.. its not fstab, but it gets the job done