Symbios SCSI issues

[Ben Boulanger]

On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Matthew J. Brodeur wrote:
>    Have you checked the settings in whatever interface the card's BIOS has 
> (equivalent to Adaptec's CTRL-A at boot)?  On many cards it's possible to 
> manually adjust the auto-termination feature and SCAM (SCSI ID 
> auto-selection), both of which can potentially argue with the OS driver.  
> You might also check the system BIOS for a "Symbios SCSI BIOS" option.  
> I've noticed it on some systems in the past, but never known what it was 
> really for.

I wouldn't think the System BIOS's setting for booting would have an 
impact on whether the SCSI BIOS would detect drives.. am I wrong there?  
The SCSI BIOS has no way (that I can find) to manually set termination.  I 
can enable or disable SCAM (disabled currently), and I've tried it both 
ways.  Disabled should be the correct setting here, right?

>    Since you're running 2.4.19, it's obviously a custom build.  Unless you 
> previously built support for the new card into your kernel you'll probably 
> have to reconfig/compile.  The RHL rescue environment actually works well 
> for this, in a pinch.

I recompiled the kernel with support for this card prior to install.  I 
made sure that the box still functioned properly with the new kernel and 
then went about installing the hardware.  Despite all of this - The SCSI 
BIOS needs to detect the drives prior to any OS talking to it.  Until that 
point, I'm SOL, as far as I know.  I can't boot with a CDROM boot image 
and force the SCSI card to detect the drives if the BIOS can't see them at 
all, can I?

Ben

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