system freezes on aic7xxx_old during boot hardware scan

[magrant69]

I have installed Gentoo 2.4.27 with a Stage 3 build on an older box I have with a Gigabyte MB, Athlon (not XP) 733 CPU, Adaptec 19160 controller, and two Hitachi SCSI disks. The install went fairly well, for a first-timer, but I can not boot in to Gentoo because the system freezes on the bootup scan. It finds the aic7xxx and loads that, then goes to aic7xxx_old and permanently hangs there.

I have tried using menuconfig to turn off all unnecessary drivers (that is, left on mostly just those that I know need to be present), turn off plug-and-play, and even removed the aic7xxx_old drivers, but nothing seems to stop it from trying to scan for that controller and hang there.

Is there a way to limit the controller models it scans for, or turn off the SCSI scanning altogether? I have doscsi in my kernel parameters, or it won't see my SCSI disks at all, but I haven't found any documentation covering the kernel parameters in detail, especially SCSI or this parameter.

I *think* it is all ready to go, if I could just boot into Gentoo!

Michael Grant

[petlab]

This might be where you need to learn to make a kernel by hand.

Does the aic_7xxx find your drives? If not, maybe it is the module that is having problems.

______________________
petlab
matlab

[dcrook]

When you configure your kernel using make menuconfig there should be ONE and only one scsi low level driver enabled. All the others should be turned off unless you have two different scsi controllers in your box. Try reconfiguring again and make sure that you just have the aic7xxx driver compiled into the kernel (*). Do not compile this as a module. Disable all the other drivers. Install your new kernel and try booting again, without using doscsi. If you have the right driver compiled into the kernel then it should just work, doscsi isn't required. Also make sure that the SCSI disk driver is also compiled into the kernel, not as a module.

If that doesn't work configure the kernel again and try the aic7xxx_old driver instead of the aix7xxx one. Do not have both of these drivers installed at once. One of these should work and it should be the aic7xxx driver.