Newbie linux installation problem with AHA2940AU

[Stuart Welham]

PC Details

Asus P55T2P4 motherboard
200Mhz Pentium, 66Mhz PCI, PNP BIOS, ISA
Award Modular BIOS v4.51 PG 09/02/96
32 MB RAM

SCSI system 
SCSI Id #0 HP C3325A 2.0 Gb Hard drive
SCSI Id #1 Iomega Jaz 1.0 Gb Removable hard drive
SCSI Id #6 Matshita CD-Rom CR-506
SCSI Id #7 AHA-2940AU SCSI controller - bios v1.21

I'm trying to install Linux-FT Version 2.0 (based on RedHat 4.1 - kernel
version 2.0.27) from the CD onto the HP hard drive and I'm getting SCSI
problems when the install script is either making the file system on the
root partition or is attempting to copy the selected packages onto the
root partition. 

The SCSI problems appear with the following example error messages from
the kernel :

<4>scsi0 Target busy, TCL=0x0
<4>SCSI disk error: host 0 channel 0 id 0 lun 0 return code=27070008
<4>scsidisk i/o error: dev 08:03, sector 708320
<4>scsi0: channel0: resetting for second half of retries
<4>SCSI bus is being reset for host 0 channel 0
<0>Kernel panic: EXT2-fs panic (device 08:03): ext2-write-inode: unable
to read i-node block - inode=96385, block=385046

The HP drive has an existing 1 Gb partition used for Windows NT
Workstation 4.0 and at first I used two further linux native 450 Mb
partitions  together with a 100 Mb linux swap partition. After the first
failure I've tried using different sized and just one linux native
partition to no avail.

I've also run the SCSI Select verify disk utility on the HP drive
several times and reset the 2940 bios values to their defaults but the
problem remains.

This PC has been running Windows NT without problem for the last six
months so I don't at first suspect a SCSI hardware problem.

Is there some boot option I need to use with the SCSI driver to enable
it to work with the 2940AU or do I need to either change something in
the controller bios or upgrade the bios to a later version (1.30?) ?

Thanks in advance from someone keen to use Linux instead of Windows NT.
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stuart at tapastda.co.uk                           Tapastda Limited
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