[syslinux] Problems booting with SCSI CD

Theodore Kilgore kilgota at khayyam.math.auburn.edu
Thu Oct 31 20:54:46 PST 2002


Greetings from beautiful Alabama.

You have requested for people to let you know if they are having any
problem:

I am a professor in the Department of Mathematics, Auburn University.
Among other activities, I do a lot of Linux installations on older
computers, many of which are old Gateway Pentium Pro boxes which came
with Adaptec 2940 SCSI cards and SCSI CD.

I have burned several Slackware 8.1 bootable CDs which work nicely on
any IDE CD-ROM setup, provided the machine's BIOS is new enough to
support booting from CD. But on these Gateway machines the following:

1. BIOS sees the SCSI devices -- one SCSI hard drive and one SCSI
CD-ROM.
2. BIOS reports that the CD is bootable.
3. The message comes up about "winging it" and then the next line says
there is a failure to "access" the CD-ROM device (Strange,because these
error messages were read from the CD, right?).

Thus, I cannot even get so far as a "Boot:" prompt, which would let me
choose the correct boot kernel for using that particular SCSI card (for
Slackware 8.1 that is the adaptec.s kernel).

Advice would be appreciated. If you need more exact information about
the machine's BIOS, make and model of CD, or anything else like that,
please let me know. I will be glad to oblige, but right now I am at home
and the machines are at work, and I could only guess about what you
might actually need.

Another line of approach which would partially solve my problem would be
to be able to start up with a boot floppy (using the right kernel,
naturally) and be able to pass a parameter at "Boot:" which says to
mount the SCSI CD (or for that matter other CD, on a machine which does
not support booting from CD).  And then it would be possible at least
not to use the sequence of 5 installation rootdisks. I wonder if it is
possible to do that?

I hope that you can be of assistance to me, and also I am glad, if
possible, to be of assistance to you, by honoring your request to learn
about any problems that people may be having.

Theodore Kilgore





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