Very Computer

I need your help. I apologize for the length but the history may be
significant.

For the first time I built a linux system - FIC VA-503+ mb with Mylex
958 SCSI controller with 2 baraccuda 15150W scsi2 hard drives and a teac
32x scsi cdrom attached. everything runs at 100Mhz.

initial installation of redhat linux 5.1 went like a charm and the
system worked flawlessly for 3 days. when rebooting system after
configuring network and printer, errors were reported when attempts were
made to access the drives. rescuing did not help.

on bootup i entered the scsi controller's auto-scsi setup. it saw the
drives fine so i reformatted them.

when i attempted the reinstallation, the redhat installer starts from
the cdrom but when it goes to scan the scsi bus it never returns - but
the activity lights on both 'cudas blink on in unison every few seconds.

if i try to boot from the floppy boot disk, i get the following messages
repeatedly:

SCSI 0: *** BT 958 initialized successfully
SCSI host 0 abort (pid 0) timed-out - resetting
SCSI bus is being reset for host 0 channel 0
resetting BusLogic 958 - due to Target 0

i've checked out red hat's site without luck - the same goes for mylex
and this list.

any hints, suggestions or solutions would be very much appreciated.

thanks
denis

I don't know if it's related, but I'd been having problems with SCSI on my
system, also RedHat 5.1 i486 DX4-100.

I had to build a kernel with built in SCSI support for my NCR controller. I
can now use the system fine.
It looks to me like there is a problem with modular SCSI support. If I use
modular support I get timeouts.  With
the new kernel the system works just fine.

I use a small IDE drive for /boot with the new kernel.  "/" is now on
/dev/sda1. When doing the "make menuconfig"
I picked 10MB/s for FAST SCSI-2, not the default 5MB/s.  The system is so
much faster now!

Regards,

Mark Emery