Installation Problem with SCSI Adapter and 4.9

[Matt Smith]

I got an old machine from a garage sale a couple months ago and have been 
unable to install any operating system on it. Mainly with errors like 
isolinux: spec packet failed to locate cd rom device. And with FreeBSD 5.1 i 
got:

Building the boot loader arguments:
Read Error: 0x01
Could not find Primary Volume Descriptor

Someone on IRC pointed me to a release not for 5.1 about how older SCSI 
CD-Rom Drives will not work anymore with 5.1 on installs. He also told me 
that 4.9 might work then. So I downloaded 4.9 and put it in. It booted to 
the installer unlike pretty much every operating system i've tried. During 
the installation once i got the the partitioning and anything related to the 
hard drive i would get an error saying there was no disk detected. The Hard 
Drive and CD-Rom Drive are both detected on the POST, however. I've been 
able to pull out a lot of information on whats going on.

Its an Adaptec AHA 2940 W Ultra/Ultra Bios 1.23 SCSI Controller with a 
Seagate hard drive and a Plextor CD-Rom Drive. The machine is a pentium pro 
200mhz with a 3com nic and a Matrox vga card. It only has 1 IDE interface on 
the motherboard which is missing pins so i have no floppy drive on it.

Hard Drive(Lun:0) - - - SCSI Controller(Lun-7 - - - Plextor CD-Rom 
Drive(Lun:3).
They are both on different cables. I've verified that both cables work. The 
Controller does talk to the hard drive also. You can manually format it in 
the SCSI Controllers bios. So Far i've tried changing the termination from 
automatic to every option. Turned off bios translation. Turned off Lun 
Support. Modified the kernel config file to make sure the settings were 
accurate. Also in tty2 at the end there were a few interesting messages.

(da0:ahc0"0"0"0): MEDIUM ERROR asc:31,0
DEBUG: Add mapping for /dev/cuaa0 to sl10
DEBUG: Add mapping for /dev/cuaa1 to sl10
DEBUG: Unable to open disk cd0
DEBUG: Unable to open disk da0

So i launched a emegency shell in tty4 and did camcontrol devlist. It showed 
the CD-Rom Drive and the Hard Drive. No SCSI Controller though if one was 
suppost to be present. It was after this we turned off DOS Translation and 
Lun Support. Still no go. If someone can help please do. I've spent so much 
time on this and i can't think of anything else that might work.

- Matt Smith

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