On 5/6/2005 2:49 PM Drew Tomlinson wrote:
On 5/6/2005 10:39 AM Drew Tomlinson wrote:
I've used FreeBSD for about 4 years but am new to Linux. After starting with Fedora Core 3 two weeks ago, I quickly learned about "rpm hell" once I built a custom kernel to support my hardware. I missed the ports system with which I was familiar in FreeBSD. Several people suggested Gentoo might be a better distro for what I wanted so I checked out the site and liked what I saw.
So no I have a minimal 2005.0 LiveCD booted and am logged in via ssh. I'm following the installation handbook section 4 regarding partitioning. However I don't seem to have my SCSI drives available. I have 3 drives in the system as follows:
160 GB IDE drive attached to the PATA (or IDE) connector on a Promise 150 SATA controller.
18 GB SCSI drive attached to an Advansys card
36 GB SCSI drive attached to an Advansys card
The only device I seem to have is /dev/sda1 which fdisk reports as a 163 GB drive. So I assume that this is my IDE drive seen as a SCSI device because it's attached to the Promise SATA controller? And if my assumption is correct, how can I enable the Advansys controller? If possible, I'd prefer to do it without rebooting because I won't be near the console for about 7 more hours. I'm at work. System is at home.
After spending most of the day Googling, it appears that I need a file called advansys.ko (that has been compiled appropriately) in /mnt/livecd/lib/modules/2.6.11-gentoo-r3/kernel/drivers/scsi. Then I could load it with 'modprobe advansys'. Is this correct?
If it is, can anyone tell me if the advansys module is available on older installation CDs? There is some indication that it used to exist. Also, I have an advansys driver disk I downloaded which worked when installing Fedora Core 3. I was able to extract the modules.cgz file on it and found an advansys.ko module that appears to have been compiled for kernel 2.6.9, judging from the directory structure. Any ideas on if this might work? I've tried loading it via wget but all the mounted file systems are read-only. I guess I might have to dig up a floppy drive and install it...
I'm starting to feel like I'm talking to myself. :) Seriously, I keep replying for the benefit of some other poor soul who may have the same problems I'm having.
I finally figured out that when the livecd is booted, /tmp is writable. Thus I managed to copy the advansys.ko file I have to /tmp. But alas, modprobe doesn't see it because it's not in the normal module path. Ah, but more reading tells me that modprobe is the "smart" wrapper. insmod is the actual command that inserts the module. So I try 'insmod advansys.ko' but get:
insmod: error inserting 'advansys.ko': -1 Invalid module format
So is this because the module really won't work with Gentoo 2005.0? Or does this have something to do with 'depmod'. I'm beginning to think that what I'm trying to do isn't possible, short of installing on my IDE drive and then building my own LiveCD with all the required parts. I can't believe it's supposed to be this hard. I must be missing the obvious.
Thanks,
Drew
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