Les Mikesell wrote:
I'm not being dogmatic about it being better, I'm being dogmatic about no one else being able to help with additional problems on an upgraded machine because no one will know which bits are left over from the previous version.
You seem to misunderstand. I'm not asking for your (or anyone's) help. This particular machine - with an Asus P2B-LS motherboard - has been running without any problems, 24/7, for 5 or 6 years. [Well, the disk seemed sick once, so I changed it.]
I'm simply pointing out that this machine _does not boot_ if I do a clean install. I hope I have explained the exact reason for this, namely, mkinitrd does not install the correct SCSI driver.
My deduction from this is that it is not true that a clean installation is _always_ better than an upgrade. Something that does not work cannot be better than something that does.
Some bugs aren't found until someone tries the combination of things that the program gets wrong. Reporting your lspci output and the module that is wrongly installed is probably the best you can do along with using whatever means you can to work around the bug.
Sigh. The machine does not run if I do a clean install, so I cannot "report my lspci output". The machine runs perfectly when I compile the kernel (with scsi compiled in it rather than a module) so there is no point in reporting my lspci output.
But here it is if you want to see it.
============================================ [tim@alfred ~]$ lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 03) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 03) 00:04.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02) 00:04.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01) 00:04.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01) 00:04.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02) 00:06.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-2940U2/U2W / 7890/7891 00:07.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 05) 00:09.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10) 00:0a.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 02) 00:0a.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 02) 00:0b.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1410 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 01) 00:0c.0 Multimedia audio controller: Platform Technologies, Inc. AGOGO sound chip (aka ESS Maestro 1) (rev 10) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV5 [RIVA TNT2/TNT2 Pro] (rev 11) ============================================