A SCSI problem

Wednesday, 21 January 2004

I have several old Intel servers with a dual-channel SCSI controller
(Adaptec AIC-7770). They have been running for six years without a hitch.
Although they have slow processors, P3-75's, they serve as our archive
perfectly. Each has 8 36 GB SCSI drives.

They have been running RedHat Linux 7.2. The Kernel is 2.4.7-10. I needed to
upgrade to a newer release for security and to get the most recent SAMBA
features. I tried to upgrade to RH9, no joy, the adapter is not recognized.
Now as part of another project I tried the Fedora distribution. No joy here
either. I rebuilt the kernel (.2149) turning on the EISA/VL probes for the
AIC-7770 and it still ignores the controller.

The SCSI is an embedded Adaptec AIC-7770 EISA (Adaptec AHA274x). During the
boot process that worked, the controller was recognized and the init
apparently downloaded some sequencer code.

A search of the RedHat site turned up my past attempts and a Google search
turned up some references, however I was unable to get any usable indication
of where to turn.

I would really appreciate a bit of help getting this system up to date.

Thanks in advance for any counsel you may offer.