Re: [PLUG] Board not recognized at boot

[Doug Crompton <doug@crompton.com>]

Ok to follow up on this and what I found.....

First of all the suggestion to check initrd was not so far off base. My
system did have a SCSI card in it when I installed SUSE 10 a few months
ago. It had a SCSI CD drive hung on it as the only device. I also had a
PATA CD and my main and only hard drive was PATA.

I added a Promise SATA300 TX4 last week with two 250GB SATA drives. At the
same time I removed the adaptec scsi card and CD drive.

After Mod'ing the sata_promise.c file to add the product code for this
board, as per Goggle search, compiling the module, and adding it to
/lib/modules, I was able to modprobe it and have access to the drives.

I was not however able to get it to come up after a boot.

So as suggested, and after some research, I looked in
/etc/sysconfig/kernel which lists the modules that mkinitrd uses to make
the image. Sure enough sata_promise was in their - for some reason listed
twice, but no libata or scsi_mod. I corrected this, copied my exisitng
/boot/initrd for backup and ran mkinitrd which created a new /boot/initrd
image. After booting the drives were there.

A good learning experience. Thanks for the help.

Doug

On Sun, 15 Jan 2006, sean finney wrote:

> hey doug,
>
> On Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 11:36:19AM -0500, Doug Crompton wrote:
> > Would this matter if the root filesystem was not on the drives/interface
> > in question. As you can see from dmesg these drives are not even
> > partitioned/formated. My files and boot are on a PATA attached drive on a
> > different interface and they work fine.
>
> if you don't need it to boot, you don't need it in your initrd.
>
> my guess is that there's some kind of race condition in the
> order that drivers are being loaded.  that is, the sata driver
> depends on some other driver already being loaded *and initialized*,
> even though it hasn't ensured this.
>
> finding out what this is might be tricky, but i'd start by booting
> with init=/bin/sh, and trying
>
> mount -o remount,rw /
> lsmod > first.txt
> modprobe sata_promise
> lsmod > second.txt
> rmmod sata_promise
> modprobe sata_promise > third.txt
> mount -o remount,ro /
>
> and if you're lucky, things won't work after the first modprobe,
> but will after the second.  you can then use diff to determine
> what other modules were also loaded.  then you can reboot,
> and try loading these other modules first, and then loading
> sata_promise.  if you're lucky again, it should then work on the
> first try.  if that works, then you jsut need to configure your
> system to load the other modules first, which you can usually do
> simply by listing them in /etc/modules, but ymmv with different
> distros...
>
>
> anyway, hth
> 	sean
>


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