FC-4 -- unhappy experiences

[Robin Laing]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> 
> 
>>>==============================================
>>>Program:   Unicore BIOS Agent Version 1.8
>>>BIOS Date: 07/16/99
>>>BIOS Type: Award Modular BIOS v4.51PG
>>>BIOS ID:   07/16/99-i440BX-P2B
>>>BIOS Eval: ASUS P2B-LS ACPI BIOS Revision 1010
>>>Chipset:   Intel 440BX/ZX rev 3
>>>Superio:   Winbond 977TF rev 0 found at port 3F0h
>>>==============================================
>>
>>Ever considered a BIOS update?
>>
>>ftp://ftp.asuscom.de/pub/ASUSCOM/BIOS/Slot_I/INTEL_Chipset/i440BX/P2B-LS/
>>
>>The BIOS for your motherboard model too updates the SCSI component
>>inside it.
> 
> 
> I did actually update the SCSI BIOS fairly recently.
> 
> It seems to me that the fault in the "official" kernels
> must be that they are trying to read from the disk
> before the driver is fully installed.
> 
> I notice that the driver takes quite a long time - perhaps 10 seconds -
> to find the two SCSI disks.
> 
> IIRC the last distribution kernel that worked was the one with Redhat-8.2 .
> 
> Having said that, Knoppix, Suse and tomsrtbt all seem to boot fine.
> 
> I think my motherboard was fairly popular,
> so there must be a few machines still out there with it inside.
> 
> 

Ah, this is one issue that has occurred to me and I just saw last week 
with Adaptec controllers waiting for the SCSI drives on another 
computer.  I believe that there is a setting to delay the bios until 
the drives are detected.

On my SCSI systems, I had to do a cold boot and then warm reboot to 
get the SCSI drives recognized.  This is what we had to do to a 
machine on Friday that had the same problem.

Check you bios and see if there is a setting to delay until the drives 
are probed.

Heck on the old machine it even happened with OS/2.
-- 
Robin Laing