SCSI not found during install - help!

[John Nielsen]

On Tuesday 23 January 2007 15:32, John D. Reeve wrote:
> I'm trying to install FreeBSD on a system consisting of an Ampro
> Littleboard 486 with 32 Mb ram, a built-in Adaptec 6360 SCSI controller, an
> 18.2 Gb Quantum Atlas III SCSI drive (50 pin narrow), a 256 Mb IDE flash
> drive containing MS-DOS, and an IDE CD drive.  I want FreeBSD to take over
> the entire SCSI drive.  The SCSI drive has been low-level formatted using
> the software that came with the Ampro for the Adaptec controller.  I'm
> trying to install FreeBSD 6.1 using three floppies (boot, kernel 1, kernel
> 2) and CD's containing the rest of the system.

Sounds like you're well prepared.

> Here is the problem.  After booting with the floppies and getting to the
> point where I'm supposed to select the drive for FreeBSD, the install
> program doesn't see the SCSI drive.  It does see the IDE flash drive.  The
> odd thing is that under MS-DOS, the fdisk program finds the SCSI drive and
> allows me to partition it, at least a 230 Mb piece of it.  I can format
> this piece for DOS and copy files to it, so the drive does seem to be
> working.  I have the BIOS configured to see the SCSI as the second hard
> drive in the system.  According to the documentation with the Ampro, the
> BIOS can supposedly handle drives of this size or larger.

DOS just uses BIOS calls to access the hard drive. FreeBSD and other real 
operating systems that expect decent drive performance use actual real 
drivers to access the hardware. In this case, the driver you need isn't 
enabled by default in recent versions of FreeBSD. You most likely want to use 
the aic(4) driver for your controller. Fortunately for you it _is_ included 
in the GENERIC kernel, but is just disabled in device.hints.

To install, you'll need to escape to the boot loader prompt before the kernel 
is booted and type something like the following:
	set hint.aic.0.disabled="0"
Then type "boot" to continue the normal bootup process.

This is just off the top of my head and based on the aic(4) manpage and 
GENERIC and device.hints from my 6.2-RELEASE desktop; I haven't used your 
controller and I'm not 100% sure of the syntax for the preboot environment.

JN