Adaptec 19160 Problems

Jason Perlow (perlow@hotmail.com)
Mon, 08 Jan 2001 18:30:39


Greetings (and Linus and Alan if youre listening, thanks):

I'm having a few bizarre problems with an adaptec 19160 scsi controller and
several Linux distributions inlcluding Redhat 6.2 and 7.0, and I was
wondering if anyone encountered anything similar and might be able to help.

The machine is an Athlon 1.2Ghz with 512MB PC133 RAM, Microstar VIA KT-133
Pro2 motherboard, with twin Adaptec 19160 32-bit SCSI untra 3 controllers.

Both scsi chains are properly terminated with U-160 rated cable, both drives
are recognized by adaptec's bios and utilities. Irregardless of which brand
of Ultra160 10K RPM hard disk I use (I have several set up in removable bays
as bootable devices), during the setup routine and boot sequence of every
distro I have tried with 2.2 kernels, the drives initialize but the bus
appears to constantly reset and the drives timeout and re-try to initialize
again and again and again according to console error messages when the
Adaptec 7892 module attempts to load, and I cant progress to the
partitioning stages. The only way to get around this is to use an IDE boot
device and use the disk as secondary storage.

This appears to occur with Redhat 6.2, Redhat 7, Mandrake 7.2 and Suse 7.0 .
I know the hardware configuration is ok because I am using one of the
removable drives with Windows 2000 and Windows ME just fine.

I have also used these same drives on Linux with other machines that have
similar adaptec U160 chipsets (SGI 330, IBM Intellistation) and with the
29160 controller (64 bit PCI version of 7892 chipset) without these
problems, so this is puzzling the hell out of me. I have also tried ripping
these controllers out of this new athlon box and tried them as bootable
devices in a Pentium III machine, same problems.

Anyone know who is responsible for the adaptec module? I'd love to be able
to kick this in the bud or find out if it was resolved in 2.4.0

thanks in advance!

Jason Perlow
President, Argonaut Systems Corp
http://www.argonautsystems.com
perlow@hotmail.com

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Contributing Editor, Sm@rt Partner www.smartpartnermag.com
Sr. Technology Editor, Linux Magazine www.linux-mag.com
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