Very Computer

I have a dual PII system with built in Adaptec 7895 SCSI.

Due to limitations with these boards, you can not use internal narrow
SCSI and external SCSI at the same time. At least I can't find a way
of doing so, anyway.

So I have added an Advansys SCSI card (made by Iwill).
This card is well supported by Linux.

The problem is this:

When I connect an optical SCSI disk to the Advansys card, everything
goes well until Linux tries to mount the external drive as SDA.

My internal SCSI disk is SDA usually (without external devices), and
so Linux "moves" the internal disk with Linux on it to SDB.
This means Linux won't boot past the SCSI driver bit (kernel panic,
can't mount root file system).

So, I have configured LILO so that my root is now SDB2 (the internal
SCSI drive). This won't work either. Everything would be fine if I
could somehow force the external drive to be SDB.

The hardware is capable of working, I tried putting a Windows NT drive
in instead of Linux and everything works fine, all my devices on the
Adaptec connector OK, and all my devices on the Advansys OK.

Does anyone have a solution?

From what I've read, make sure that your internal SCSI drive (the one you
want to be SDA) has a smaller SCSI id than the external SCSI drive. Again,
from what I've read, Linux assigns the drives in order of SCSI ids from
smallest to largest. If possible, I'd put the internal to SCSI ID 0, the
external to SCSI ID 1.

Hope this helps,
John McKown

Please pardon if this is an ignorant question, but can't each SCSI controler have its own id0, and id1, etc?
Is there some way of controling the order in which the drivers for the controlers load?

following is the /etc/fstab configuration for my optical drive: # device
directory       type    options         freq pass
/dev/sda1       /               ext2    defaults        0       1
none            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
/dev/sda4        none           swap    sw              0       0
/dev/sda2       /home           ext2    defaults        0       2
/dev/sonycd     /system_cd      iso9660 ro,noauto       0       0
/dev/sda3       /sda3           msdos   rw,defaults     0       0
/dev/hdc1       /hdc1           ext2    rw,noauto       0       0
/dev/cdrom      /cdrom          iso9660 ro,noauto       0       0
/dev/fd0        /mnt            msdos   rw,defaults     0       0
/dev/fd0        /mnt2           ext2    rw,defaults     0       0
/dev/sdb        /od             ext2    rw,noauto       0       0
/dev/sdb        /odos           msdos   rw,noauto       0      0

The entries for /dev/sdb are the optical drive ones (one for unix and one for
dos disks (dont' believe I've used the msdos yet).

Then use the mount command to mount and umount the optical drive as needed.

Good luck,
Rob

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Rob St. John

Scripture: Eccl.12:13 "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:
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