Installing Debian Sarge on a Compaq Proliant 1500

From: Vic Walker (vwalker_at_innercite.com)
Date: 01/30/05 

Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 18:58:29 -0800

Hello, I've been tearing my hair out for weeks trying to install Sarge
on an old Compaq Proliant 1500, with SCSI drives and an NCR53c8xx based
SCSI controller. I'm able to boot Sarge from the CD ok, and go through
the entire installation process. But when I reboot the machine, either
from Grub or from LILO, I get the following series of messages:

SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00
sym53c8xx: at PCI bus 0, device 10, function 0
sym53c8xx: not initializing, device not supported
/lib/modules/2.4.27-1-386/kernel/drivers/scsi/sym53c8xx.o: init_module:
No such device
/lib/modules/2.4.27-1-386/kernel/drivers/scsi/sym53c8xx.o: insmod
sym53c8xx failed
SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00
Journaled block device driver loaded
Pivot_root: no such file or directory
/sbin/init: 426: cannot open dev/console: No such file
kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

I also tried installing using Debian Woody, but had no more luck than
with Sarge.

I know that when I ran Redhat on this machine previously, I had to load
the NCR53c8xx support when I installed, or else it couldn't find the
drives, so I'm pretty sure that is the driver I need.

The drive I installed to was a Compaq BB009121301 9.1 GB SCSI drive,
partitioned into sda1 (49 megabytes) and sda2 (9 Gigabytes). /boot is on
sda1, / is on sda2. I also tried several other partitioning schemes,
tried installing Grub files on a floppy - but nothing seems to work.
Interestingly enough, the machine WILL boot from Knoppix 3.6 quite
nicely, as long as I give memory parameters on the command line at boot
time.

I have used this machine for several years as a Linux server running
Redhat 7.3, and I would be happily running it still if one of the SCSI
drives had not died and taken most of the operating system with it. I
was able to reinstall Redhat 9 - but I really need to move to Debian, or
else I'd move to Redhat's commercial product.

So, what do I need to do to get the machine to boot by itself using Debian.

Thanks very much for your help!

Vic Walker

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