Very Computer

1. Two SCSI controllers, one PCI (AHA-2940UW) and one ISA (Iomega's)

We have a Pentium Pro 200 that came with an internal Jaz drive on a Adaptec
2940UW PCI SCSI controller.  It shared this controller with an internal SCSI
CD-ROM and a 4gig W/F Seagate disk drive.  When we added some *external* SCSI
devices (a 4gig Micropolis A/V disk, a Yamaha CDR100 CDR), the Jaz drive
promptly blew its internal fuse.  And replacing it with several other Jaz
drives, which all blew their fuses with the external stuff connected, we decided
that the Jaz drive just does not like one (or more) of the external devices. So,
we are getting its own private SCSI controller.

Question: this controller is the standard, "cheap" ISA controller. It has not
arrived yet, but we are wondering:  will the system BIOS ROMs see this ISA
board before or after the PCI SCSI board?  If before, this will make the Jaz
drive /dev/sda and the system boot disk /dev/sdb.  I expect that LILO will be
most unhappy (if things in fact get that far, but I guess the BIOS can be told
to boot from A (floppy), then D (*second*) hard disk, then we have to have fun
with a boot/rescue floppy, diddle the fstab, fuss with lilo.conf, etc.

Random thoughts:

Linux is the *only* UNIX system that does NOT map SCSI controller# & IDs directly
to device names.  Instead it does a *first come, first served* drive assignment
game (ala the IntelPC BIOS & MS-*).  This can be a real pain in various
situations, esp. with portable (external) SCSI devices.  It would be *nice*
if there was a patch (or replacement SCSI module) that did a hard mapping from
controller# + SCSI ID to device name.  Iris for example has raw device names
that include the controller number and the device ID.  One can pull a bad disk
out and not have to edit fstab (except maybe to comment out the missing
partitions).  I realize that it is not possible to treat IDE devices this
way (or is it?), since IDE devices don't have ID numbers like SCSI devices.

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