SCSI boot (pre-grub/lilo) hangs, with !# (HALF SOLVED)

[georgie]

hi all

got meself a nice scsi 9GB Seagte hard drive and adaptec 2940au host adaptor

After installing both, booted up, after normal IDE detection, got SCSI BIOS screen

Went in, checked and formatted drive

Did cursory check of extra adaptor setiings (automatic terminate, etc)

Didn't fully expect this to work, but thought I'd get further than I did

Rebooted, same as above, didn't CTRL-A to go to the SCSI BIOS, then

this prints:

SCSIID 0
DEVICE IBM (model number comes up)
!#


The !# doesn't look good

It hangs, and hangs. I've retried, tried using different bootloader, changing the order of boot in the BIOS, tried turning everything onboard off

It doesn't seem to be problems with the bootloader (though I am sure that's round the corner , the drive itself seems OK (as I said, checking for errors and low-level formatting both worked OK)

lspci says

/sbin/lspci -v | grep SCSI
00:0d.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AIC-7861 (rev 03)



any thoughts?

george

++++++++

(edit)

after searching adaptec's site it turns out that