ide/scsi installation woes (w/ a few more facts)

[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 VFS not being 
able to find an 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.

(new) After I continue the boot with aic7xxx loaded, it complains about 
being unable to insert shcphp and pciehp (operation not permitted) and 
aix79xx (no such device).  Note that explicitly loading aic79xx (before 
trying aic7xxx) yields the same "no such device" error.

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

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Ken Haase