Where are my SCSI drives?

stazz · n00b Joined: 18 Jun 2004 Posts: 37

I'm going through the install guide, and am at chapter 4 (seting up the disks). (This is my first time with Gentoo, and my first time using an Alpha (system=DEC AlphaServer 4100), and my first time dealing with scsi... yikes!)

The LiveCD is in a SCSI CD-ROM - this is fine, at sr0. The floppy is at fd0, so that's OK too.

" dmesg | grep 'scsi' " gives:

scsi0: QLogic ISP1020 SCSI on PCI bus 01 device 10 irq 40 I/O base 0x200008400
scsi1: sym-2.1.17a
Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0 at scsi1, channel 0, id 5, lun 0
sr0: scsi-1 drive

So. Where are my SCSI disks? There should be a 2-disk RAID 1 and a 5-disk RAID 5...

How do I get Gentoo to see my HDs? Is there something to modprobe? Do I need to send some flags to the kernel on boot (I actually know how to do that on the Alpha

)?

Thanks for you help!

agent_jdh · Veteran Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 1783 Location: Scotland

You need to use the 'doscsi' option when you boot off the livecd (I've got a serveraid adapter and it needs this to find it)

e.g. at the boot prompt

gentoo-nofb doscsi

There is a warning though that doscsi may break some ethernet autoprobing or something, but I've never had any problems.

I tend to use the gentoo-nofb kernel as well, if you can live with a standard console size I find it bootstraps/builds a lot faster with no framebuffer.
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stazz · n00b Joined: 18 Jun 2004 Posts: 37

Ok, somewhere I got lost...

What is this "boot prompt"? If I set bad flags (ie in boot_osflags), then I get the "aboot>" prompt... but it does not understand "gentoo-nofb doscsi".

Also, "doscsi" and "-doscsi" both fall into the "bad flag" category...

I must be doing something wrong.

As far as the autoprobing of NICs, I have to modprobe my NIC manually anyway, so that's not a concern...

agent_jdh · Veteran Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 1783 Location: Scotland

When you boot off the LiveCD, you should be able to hit F1 and F2 to give you a list of boot options, that's what I'm talking about. Check it out.

Maybe the alpha LiveCD does not have this capability, I use x86.

Does the LiveCD boot straight away? Maybe then you should just modprobe the drivers for your scsi card in the same way that you do for your network card.
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stazz · n00b Joined: 18 Jun 2004 Posts: 37

Hmmm... tried hitting F1 all through the boot process, and never got a chance to give any options. Must not be there for the alpha.

I'll try figure out which drivers I need and modprobe them...

stazz · n00b Joined: 18 Jun 2004 Posts: 37

Turns out the Alpha LiveCD only has a handful of drivers, total, so it was easy to spot these:

#modprobe qlogicisp // would seem to correspond to the scsi0
and
#modprobe sym53c8xx // probably the scsi1

both run without messages. there is nothing new in dmesg. I don't see any new entries in /dev - in particular, there is still only sr0 for the cd-rom and no sd* entries... There is a sg0 entry, but "fdisk /dev/sg0" hangs before the menu comes up (no messages).

Is there something else that needs to be done to "start" the drivers? I have no idea what I'm doing now, this is WAY out of my depth...

stazz · n00b Joined: 18 Jun 2004 Posts: 37

... and one more thing. I just found out about lsmod.

If I do an lsmod on a fresh boot (no modprobes), I get:

sym53c8xx, used by 1
qlogicisp, (unused)

so, it's loading the scsi modules, but no one is using the qlogic one, which I believe is where all the disks are connected...

agent_jdh · Veteran Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 1783 Location: Scotland

You could run modprobe with -v (or -vn) to get a verbose output.

What other modules are available in the scsi section? I can't imagine the scsi disk stuff isn't compiled into the kernel (or that it woudln't get loaded when you load the qlogic module) but you never know...
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stazz · n00b Joined: 18 Jun 2004 Posts: 37

scsi drivers (/lib/modules):

qlogicfas.o
qlogocfc.o
qlogicisp.o
aic7xxx/aic7xxx.o
sym53c8xx/sym53c8xx.o

modprobe -vn just gives the "/sbin/insmod..." line for qlogicisp and sym53c8xx, the others don't even give that line. Without -n, those give insmod errors.

I tried unloading and then reloading the qlogicisp driver (modprobe -r) (old windows habbits die hard), but that didn't change anything...[/code]

agent_jdh · Veteran Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 1783 Location: Scotland

This is definetely pretty odd, what other OS's do you have installed?

The next step forward would be to file a bug report on this, the Gentoo dev the bug gets assigned to will obviously have a bit more knowledge of how things run in alpha land than I do.
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stazz · n00b Joined: 18 Jun 2004 Posts: 37

I have no other OSs installed... I got it thrusday, with the drives bare (the friend who got it from surplus had to wipe the drives to prevent "sensitive"
information from the public library database from falling into evil hands

... But right before that it was running properly under _some_ OS, and I havn't fiddled with the drives at all.

So... how do I file a bug report? never done it before, and don't know the proceedure/edicette...

Also, I found that alpha-specific problems are discussed in the "alternate platforms" (or something like that) forum. I'm going to post a link to this thread over there, in case some alpha-guru can figure out what's going on.

agent_jdh · Veteran Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 1783 Location: Scotland

That sounds reasonable.

There's a link to bugs.gentoo.org at the bottom of every forum page, the bug report process is fairly straightforward, iirc there's an etiquette readme floating around somewhere.

This should be read

https://bugs.gentoo.org/bugwritinghelp.html

And you should also do a search of bugs already filed to see if someone has already reported the problem.
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