Completely frustrated by SCSI / ISC combo

Robert Lin rlin at cs.ubc.ca
Wed Sep 12 17:34:42 AEST 1990


Here's my horror story on trying to get a SCSI system to work with
ISC 2.0.2. 

I have an Adaptec 2732B RLL controller, which I am quite happy with.
I needed to add more disk storage, so I thought it would be a neat
idea to grab that spare 330M Miniscribe 9380S and hook it up to
an Adaptec 1540B. 

I got everything more or less working. By more or less, I mean
whenever I boot into ISC on my RLL drive, it would take an awful 
long time before it would get past the "Booting Unix System...."
prompt. Half the time, it wouldn't even boot at all. 

So I decided to kick out the RLL system, buy the 1542B, and use a
SCSI only system. Again the same problem. I configured the IRQ to
be 14, the interrupt channel select to be 14 also, and the installation
disk wouldn't even boot. After trying many different things, I got
it to boot on IRQ 15, interrupt select channel 14.

After ISC got installed, it wouldn't boot again. Changing it back
to IRQ 14, select 14 seemed to work. But only sporadically. The boot
procedure, when it does work, is unbearably slow. It takes its sweet
time, and half the time it aborts in midst of boot saying

srmount - unable to mount root
Attempting to dump 1024 pages
1 page dumped
Any key to reboot

And of course, TFM only says "Refer to Release Notes on the Adaptec
SCSI controller", and the release notes only say "we support the
Adaptec 154xB controller". 

So after spending some good money for the SCSI controller and drive,
I am back where I started. Oh yes, some where during all the shenanigan
both my RLL drives got totally wiped, how I don't know.

Has any one else had any luck with AHA-1542B (only boot device) and
ISC 2.0.2? If so, what's the trick??

-Robert Lin <rlin at cs.ubc.ca>



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