ide/scsi installation woes

[Kenneth Haase]

I am having problems installing the latest Ubuntu (or earlier ones) on 
my 2-processor SMP Athlon box with both scsi and IDE drives.

The machine has one IDE hard disk, an IDE CD/DVD/Burner combo, and two 
SCSI buses, each with a SCSI drive.  In the process of trying to 
isolate the problem, I reset the BIOS to look at the IDE disk first, 
just to get a simple case.  I've successfully installed Ubuntu on a 
uni-processor Intel machine with a single IDE drive.  The problem 
machine has successfully installed Red Hat, Libranet, and Suse at 
various points.

The problem is that  it doesn't seem to be able to see the SCSI drives 
when it boots and I would like to put some partitions (/home and /usr, 
ideally) on the SCSI drives.  It also complains about not being able to 
find ext2 or ext3 file systems on the IDE drive (hdc), but it does 
eventually boot with the Reiser FS it finds there.

During the fourth try at an install, I was able to work around this by 
explicitly loading aic7xxxx when the failed boot got me to a prompt.  
Then, the SCSI drives were visible and I could mount them and continue 
with the boot.  I could go ahead, do the rest of the install and now it 
can boot but only with manual intervention to load the aix7xxx module.

The SCSI adapters are onboard the S2462 Thunder K7 motherboard and the 
manual describes it as an Adaptec 7899W.  At some point, I think it may 
have been trying to load the aic79xx module, but it isn't doing it now 
after I did the manual load and a depmod.

I have since upgraded to the latest SMP kernel (for independent 
reasons) and the problem persists.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Ken Haase