[KLUG Members] Re: Install issues -- Is it just booting the CD? Or supporting the SCSI card?

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Tue, 2002-06-04 at 16:00, Jeremy Leonard wrote:
> I had a similar problem. I ended up using an IDE cdrom for the install. 
> Everything worked fine after that.

Oh, does he mean he cannot even get into the installer?  That's a BIOS
issue.  That P2B-D _should_ have an Adaptec BIOS for booting, and the
option to boot the CD.  You select that in the SCSI setup (usually by
hitting Ctrl-A at boot), NOT the CMOS setup.

If you are getting into the installer and it is just kernel panicing on
the Adaptec drivers, welcome to using Adaptec with Linux.  Especially
those OEM variants.

Adaptec is to SCSI what Promise is to ATA.  Retail-focused, no official
Linux support, already have their marketshare so they don't care.  They
expect their popularity to drive people to reverse engineer their specs
-- and they're actually correct, people do.

Companies like Symbios Logic in the SCSI world, and HighPoint
Technologies in the ATA world are OEM-focused, and sell their chips for
use in other people's products.  They actually sell the chips wholesale
in lots, and allow other vendors to sell their own boards, not require a
NDA/contract to develop for an OEM solution _unlike_ Adaptec or Promise
for the mainboards/PCs that use their products.

So they release complete technical specs, which allow good drivers to be
written.  Heck, both Symbios Logic and HPT officially sanction their GPL
driver developments.  This is why their drivers are often better than
Adaptec and Promise, respectively.

Of course, when it comes to "BIOS-only ATA RAID," HPT has the same
issues as Promise, just like with software modems -- the licensed, 3rd
party RAID IP is in the driver, so they are closed source.**

-- Bryan

**NOTE:  There are now independent Linux ATA RAID drivers for the
HPT/PDC ATA RAId cards thanx to the new "ataraid" driver and the
"hptraid" and "pdcraid" vendor-specific drivers that use it.  These
drivers are NOT from nor supported by HPT nor Promise at all, and should
be used at your own risk.

-- 
The US government could be 100x more effective, and 1/100th the
Constitutional worry, if it dictated its policy to Microsoft as
THE MAJOR CUSTOMER it is, and not THE REGULATOR it fails to be.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan J. Smith, SmithConcepts, Inc.   mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
Engineers and IT Professionals     http://www.SmithConcepts.com