antiX on SCSI-only machine - kernel cooking required?

Posts: 2
CeeVee
Joined: 15 Dec 2014
#1
Hi All,

In my quest for a really lightweight distro for a really old AMD K6-based computer, DistroWatch came up with AntiX.
The 13.2.386-full LiveCD booted fine and worked like a charm (as far as 450 MHz and 256 MB can stretch), so I gave it a go and installed OK. Upon reboot however, Grub does not boot beyond"Grub loading..." :-\

The system is SCSI-only (Diamond FirePort 40 SCSI host, 18 GB harddrive and 40x CD-ROM), which I figure might be problem: modern kernels do not support SCSI out-of-the-box anymore...
Unfortunately I am neither new to nor a crack in Linux, so I need help!

Do I need to cook myself a matching kernel? And how could I best go about that?
There are many, many sources on this subject, but which way to turn? Questions, questions... but many, many thanks for your help!

Regards,
Cory
Posts: 604
thriftee
Joined: 27 Feb 2009
#2
I don't know enough to help, but suspect this thread might be along the lines of what you need.


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/hardy/man4/sym.4.html"
linktext was:"http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/har ... sym.4.html"
====================================


You might look for"run with the dolphin" videos to see if there is one that might show you how to diagnose and solve it.
Posts: 1,062
Dave
Joined: 20 Jan 2010
#3
If you boot the livecd can you see the scsi drives? If so what do they show as in /dev/?

I am confused at how live cd would even see the drive in order to install to if you are missing the kernel drivers needed to run scsi.

From the last scsi machines I had it was not part of the standard notation for drives. So it did not show up as sda or hda, but rather something like /dev/map/drive... could be wrong though. I then needed to install with the cli installer it I recall correctly.

In any case maybe it is best to format the drive with gparted and then try installing through the cli installer rather than the gui installer.
Posts: 2
CeeVee
Joined: 15 Dec 2014
#4
@thriftee: Thanks for the quick reply, mate... Manpages, and a very valuable pointer - silly me never looked that way. Worse even, I realize I never searched based on type of or chipset on the controller, while both are named in this manpage. Anyway, enough to chew on for a few days __{{emoticon}}__

@Dave: Thanks also! The hard drive is /dev/sda which looked prefectly normal to me (sda2 for root, sda3 for swap, sda4 for home - this is already the n-th install, wiped and repartitioned with gparted between each try). IIRC, the CD-ROM (and CD-RW) are /dev/sr0 and /dev/sr1 respectively - have to fire up the machine to check, but need to go now; will report later.