AIC7890 causes problem with gentoo 1.4 (but not with LiveCD)

[rbergen]

I just installed Gentoo 1.4 on a Pentium II machine with an ASUS motherboard that includes an on-board Adaptec AIC7890 SCSI controller.

After going through the entire installation guide, I rebooted my newly installed Gentoo box for the first time.
During storage detection (directly after the initial RAMDISK is loaded) the messages indicate the controller is found, as well as the Seagate harddisk that is attached to it.
However, something goes wrong after that. I'm not sure exactly what it is (the messages scroll by a little too quickly), but in the end two sets of messages keep coming up alternatingly, effectively bringing the boot process to a halt.

The first set of messages ends with "Dump Card State Ends", the other with "Yikes!!! There is a loop in the free list!".

My first guess would be that this is a hardware-related problem, but the problem does not occur with the kernel on the LiveCD (2.4.21-gss), but only with the one I built during Gentoo installation (2.4.20-gentoo-r6).
The LiveCD boots fine, including the aic7xxx driver (I can see and access /dev/sda and /dev/sda1, and /proc/modules includes aic7xxx).

I would hate to have to get out the soldering iron and use it to disable the controller on my motherboard, so I a hope you guys have some other suggestions.

Thanks in advance,

Rutger

[road]

I have the same Asus motherboard + AIC7890 chipset combo as Rutger, but I only have a CDRW connected to it. Still I get the same thing as he does, after following all the instructions in the installation manual.

Well I went ahead and disabled SCSI using the jumper setting on my mobo and everything was kosher after that.

Anyone know how we can rectify this? I would like to use my CDRW..

[rbergen]

I spent some more time investigating this issue, and for me it seems that not using initrd does the trick.

Road, if you're booting from an IDE disk (as I am), I would definately try putting a # in front of the "initrd" line in grub.conf (or your lilo configuration file if you're using LILO, of course) and rebooting with your SCSI controller enabled.

I guess the Gentoo developers will just have to take a closer look at the contents of their initrd file.

Regards,

Rutger