[conspire] (forw) Re: June 25 MP installfest upgrade RH 7.3 PC to Centos56 continuation

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:02:35 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: wood eddie <ewood111 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: June 25 MP installfest upgrade RH 7.3 PC to Centos56
	continuation
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting wood eddie (ewood111 at yahoo.com):

> Thanks for reply. Now I am changing my PC hardware. 

Of course, you want to back up everything you care about before changing
any hardware.

> Today bought adaptec 2940 SCSI card, memory upgrade 512MB to 2 GB[1 GB
> PC2700 + 1 GB PC3200 memory].  Installed these 2 to computer. When
> system boots, mother board BIOS shows 2097152K, which means memory
> upgrade OK ?

Seems like.

> Next, boot CD ROM using RH 7.3, to verify SCSI card, and 2 disks
> visible prior to Centos [need get DVD reader] upgrade.

They're really cheap, fortunately.

> When boot up RH 7.3....

Booting from installation CDs?   From an installation on your hard
drives?  You didn't say.

Please don't forget that I am not really briefed on what happened to
your system during the CABAL meeting, as I was busy with other things.

> ...[which worked fine previously using Buslogic Flashpoint SCSI] now
> with 2940 SCSI, receives message "Loading aic7xx driver" and computer
> is hung. Even Alt-ctrl-del does not do anything.  Could this be
> memory, should I go back to previous ?

Long enough to do a complete backup (say, onto DVR-R or CD-R discs) of 
everything you care about on your hard disks, yes.

> Take RH 7.3 install CD out of CDROM, and system boots up with "Boot
> disk failure, insert system disk and press Enter". Suggestions ? 

I'm unclear on whether you mean with the BusLogic card back in, or the
Adaptec.

If you are able to get your system working again with the BusLogic, then
by all means do an immediate backup onto archival media, or onto a
second running Linux system, of the data you need to carry forward onto
the rebuilt system.  If you are not successful, then I'm really sorry,
but you really needed to do a backup first.  

My recollection is that you carefully left a copy of the data you really
care about on the partition you normally leave mounted as /ds4 (or
something like that) for safekeeping.  You should, at worst, be able to
put your BusLogic HBA back into your system, do a fresh installation of
RHL 7.3 onto the other partitions, and thereby restore your ability to
have access to your saved data.  You can then do a backup of the data
onto CD-R or DVD-R discs, or to somewhere else to keep it safe.

Once you have your data backed up onto archival media, _then_ you can
put the Adaptec card into your system and connect the hard drives to it.
Personally, I would use the Adaptec BIOS utilities (Ctrl-A at bootup) to
do a low-level format of your two hard drives, then install your choice
of Linux distribution (such as CentOS 5.6) onto the system.

Even before doing that, you should go into the Ctrl-A Adaptec BIOS and 
go through the BIOS setup and utilities, e.g., make sure the Adaptec
card can see and read the drives.

As I said earlier, it is never a certain thing for a hard drive
formatted on one brand of SCSI host bus adapter (such as BusLogic) to
be readable on a different brand (such as Adaptec).  That could very
well be what you are now seeing.


----- End forwarded message -----