hi all Thanks for the helpful comments re: my LILO problem. I've temporarily abandoned adding a SCSI drive from an old sparc station, and have got the server booting properly again through LILO. Here's what I'm trying to do though, if anyone has any ideas they'd be much appreciated.
The HDD is a 50pin SCSI drive from an old Sun sparc station (which was running Debian also - and has linux & Sun partitions) - the old HDD does not boot. What I'd like to do is install this drive into the newer Dell server we have here at the Uni. The Dell server has an on-board SCSI Ultra-2 controller for two Seagate drives, and a separate PCI SCSI card for the DDS4 tape drive. This separate card has both an Ultra-2 channel and a separate Fast/Ultra channel for older SCSI devices. My basic plan of attack has been to install the old Sun HDD internally and hook it up through the Ultra channel on the SCSI card. Everything's terminated correctly, and at boot time the controller correctly identifies the SCSI id and type of the old Sun HDD. The Sun disk is set at id 3, the two Seagate drives are set at id's 0 and 1. The problem is that the PCI SCSI controller initialises prior to the onboard Ultra-2 controller (which controls the drive that I want the system to boot off). This means that the old Sun HDD becomes /dev/sda, while the two Seagate drives become /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc respectively. LILO is set up on the Seagate HDD at id 0, and the config file tells LILO to look for the kernel and root partition on "/dev/sda1". If I boot the server with the old Sun HDD attached, I get a message along the lines of "can't find boot device", if I take it out again, the Seagate drive can't boot (it gets to "LI" and hangs). What I'd like to do is make sure that the old Sun HDD is /dev/sdc - NOT /dev/sda - in which case the machine should boot a-ok. However, for the life of me I can't get Linux to recognise it as anything but /dev/sda. I've tried setting it's id to 0, and the normal Seagate boot drive to 1 (and changed the SCSI controller to boot from "1") - but this doesn't work either - the Sun disk is still /dev/sda. I've also told the BIOS to give the on-board controller a higher boot priority than the PCI SCSI controller - but this doesn't change Linux-world. I realise know that it's probably the fact that the PCI SCSI controller initialises before the on-board, meaning that the old Sun HDD is detected before the two Seagate drives attached to the on-board controller. I'm not sure if, and how, I can get the on-board controller to kick-in first, meaning that my main system drive (SCSI id 0), is /dev/sda??? *Any* help would be greatly appreciated. thanks Andrew ----------------------------------------- Andrew McRobert LL.B B.Sc (Comp. Sci) IT Liaison Officer School of Law Murdoch University Ph: +61 8 9360 6479 Fax: +61 8 9310 6671 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
