In this article I struggled with a Barracuda ST15150N drive that had problems with Tagged Command Queueing. Well, it is nice to have an install diskette that works with a serial console and works with the ST15150N. This article will guide you through the modification of a stock RedHat install boot disk. I will start with the diskette image created in this article. If you don’t want to use the serial port console, then just use the regular boot.img file from the Red Hat 8.0 CD.
First, we need to create the proper modules. Use the kernel source that comes with Red Hat.
[linux-2.4]# make mrproper [linux-2.4]# cp configs/kernel-2.4.18-i386-BOOT.config ./.config [linux-2.4]# make oldconfig [linux-2.4]# make xconfig |
For this drive and Adaptec card, the old driver seems to work better with tagged command queueing disabled, so set this in the scsi/low level drivers area on the aic7xxx_old driver. After you are done, edit Makefile in the root of your source tree (/usr/src/linux-2.4) so that the fourth line is EXTRAVERSION = -14BOOT. This will match the version on your modules with the kernel version on the boot disk. This assumes you are using the original kernel source off of the Red Hat 8.0 CD. This should work otherwise for a variety of reasons, but there are a lot of hard coded parts of the Red Hat install diskette. Many programs and settings that are usually separate are munged together (like loader or init vs. insmod and linuxrc). It is best to just go with it and make your modules *exactly* the same. Now, let’s build the kernel and modules:
[linux-2.4]# make dep clean bzImage modules |
We will put our newly compiled aic7xxx_old module into the modules.cgz file, wich is a compressed cpio archive. The trick is that we need to uncompress initrd.img to get at modules.cgz, and then we need to wrap it all back up again. To make it simpler, we will keep the name as aic78xxx:
[tmp]# mdir Volume in drive A has no label Volume Serial Number is 3D7E-5686 Directory for A:/ LDLINUX SYS 7112 09-10-2002 16:31 SYSLINUX CFG 800 12-18-2002 5:27 SYSLINUX PNG 7164 09-10-2002 16:31 INITRD IMG 518862 09-10-2002 16:31 VMLINUZ 852324 09-10-2002 16:31 SPLASH LSS 12070 09-10-2002 16:31 BOOT MSG 342 09-10-2002 16:31 GENERAL MSG 957 09-10-2002 16:31 OPTIONS MSG 730 09-10-2002 16:31 PARAM MSG 869 09-10-2002 16:31 RESCUE MSG 508 09-10-2002 16:31 SNAKE MSG 549 09-10-2002 16:31 12 files 1 402 287 bytes 59 904 bytes free [tmp]# mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt [tmp]# cp /mnt/initrd.img /tmp/ cp: overwrite `/tmp/initrd.img'? y [tmp]# gzip -dc /tmp/initrd.img > /tmp/initrd.unc.img [tmp]# mkdir /tmp/imagemount [tmp]# mount -o loop /tmp/initrd.unc.img /tmp/imagemount [tmp]# gzip -dc /tmp/imagemount/modules/modules.cgz > /tmp/modules.cpio [tmp]# mkdir /tmp/modules [tmp]# cd /tmp/modules [tmp]# cpio -idumv < ../modules.cpio 2.4.18-14BOOT/aic7xxx.o 2.4.18-14BOOT/megaraid.o 2.4.18-14BOOT/ncr53c8xx.o 2.4.18-14BOOT/scsi_mod.o 2.4.18-14BOOT/sd_mod.o 2.4.18-14BOOT/sr_mod.o 2.4.18-14BOOT/sym53c8xx.o 2.4.18-14BOOT/usb-storage.o 934 blocks [modules]# cd 2.4.18-14BOOT [2.4.18-14BOOT]# rm aic7xxx.o rm: remove regular file `aic7xxx.o'? y [2.4.18-14BOOT]# cp /usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/scsi/aic7xxx_old.o ./aic7xxx.o [2.4.18-14BOOT]# cd .. [modules]# find . -type f | cpio -ocO /tmp/newmods.cpio 912 blocks [modules]# cd .. [tmp]# gzip -c newmods.cpio > imagemount/modules/modules.cgz [tmp]# umount /tmp/imagemount [tmp]# gzip -c initrd.unc.img > initrd.img [tmp]# cp initrd.img /mnt cp: overwrite `/mnt/initrd.img'? y [tmp]# umount /mnt |
We now have a diskette that will install Red Hat 8.0 just swimmingly on a system with an old Adaptec 2940 and an ST15150N via the serial port. To get the system to boot again after the install, I used the kernel from this article, since I like it so much. Just use the diskette created above, but type linux rescue to get access to the file system. Copy the vmlinuz and System.map over, modify your boot loader stuff, and all is good.
