2.2.X+scsi+ide=timeout mystery

[andy at netfall.com]

Welcome to the club.  I've had many IDE related problems with LILO. 
{off-subject gripe follows} LILO's complete inability to handle large
disks is a real problem for me.  Also, with just an IDE disk plugged
into one system of mine, if I ran lilo to do it's thing after building
a new kernel, on boot up it only managed to say 'LI' before hanging. 
Taking the disk out didn't help, but taking the disk out, booting off a
rescue floppy, and rerunning lilo again (no changes to lilo.conf) and
the system would boot again.  I have another system, lilo on the hard
disk stops in the same spot ('LI') on bootup as long as I have two IDE
disks installed (the ide config doesn't matter: all permutations using
two IDE channels were tried).  Didn't matter what other ide devices
(CDROMs) were or were not attached or in what configuration.  Remove
either disk, and it would go.  Booting off a floppy had no such
problems, even though they were the same version of lilo.  Obviously I
usually use non-ide disks (I AM on this list), so I don't see this very
often.  Anybody know when these many deficiencies of lilo are planned
to be addressed?  Sorry for being a bit off subject.

I haven't really had a problem once the kernel loads.

a

On 23 Jan, Doug Ledford wrote:
> Steve Cahill wrote:
>> 
>> Well Folks,
>> 
>> This one is a real mystery.....
>> 
>> I cannot believe that my setup is unique, but hey... stranger things can
>> happen I suppose. I have an Adaptec AHA-2940U2W with several devices ( see
>> 2.0.38 dmesg out below), and an IDE primary drive where my boot record lives
>> with a (bootable) DOS partition as well as some other Linux partitions:
>> 
>> hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 >
>> hda: WDC AC26400B, 6149MB w/512kB Cache, CHS=784/255/63
>> 
>> My main (mother) board is an FIC PA-2013 with a 350MHz AMD K6-2
>> CPU, Millenium G200 video adapter, 128MB (PC100) SDRAM, sound card and modem
>> reside in the 2 ISA slots and a 3COM 3c905B Cyclone ethernet card in one of
>> the PCI slots.
>> (aka very typical setup??)
>> 
>> When booting any Linux 2.2.X kernel with this IDE drive present I get a
>> timeout message (which I have posted before, but will include here for
>> completeness):
>> 
>> scsi : aborting command due to timeout : pid 60, scsi0, channel 0, id 1, lun
>> 0 0x28 00 00 70 c2 ce 00 00 02 00
>> 
>> The timeout can last anywhere from 25 to 40 seconds.  Another symptom is
>> LILO will hang (i.e. executing lilo) or take a very long time to execute.
>> 
>> When I boot any of the 2.2.X kernels without this drive present the timeout
>> disappears. In fact when I boot with this drive present in any of the newer
>> 2.0.3X kernels which support this adapter there is NO timeout and lilo
>> behaves normally!
>> 
>> So why don't I just shutup and just use the 2.0.38 kernel? Well I do, but
>> I would like to have some of the newer 2.2.X kernel features not present in
>> the 2.0.3X kernels.
>> 
>> If anyone has a similiar hardware setup (at the very least has the 2940U2W)
>> that mixes both scsi and ide in the 2.2.X kernels and get no timeouts or
>> lilo troubles, please let me know. I have discussed this at length with Doug
>> Ledford and I am sure he would be interested in knowing also. It is possible
>> that there is something in my BIOS (and/or BIOS settings) that the 2.0.3X
>> kernels (as well as WINDOZE :) overlooks or doesn't care about.
> 
> We had a machine in here in the test lab with the same problem.  After
> upgrading the kernel to a 2.2.14 or later kernel, the problem myseriously went
> away.  We attribute it to IDE changes in the 2.2.14 kernel patch.  But, I'm
> not an IDE expert....
> 




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