YDL, Firewire, and SCSI devices

[Michael George]

This post is mostly as a head's up and something to go into the  
archives for anyone who is trying to work with a bootable firewire  
drive.  I ran into this problem with an XServe, but it can happen with  
any expandable system.

Using two HOWTO's on the topic (http://131.204.27.45/ydl-howto/ and  
http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/pipermail/yellowdog-general/2003- 
October/010501.html) I had great success in creating a firewire drive  
that would boot on my Power Mac and my iBook.

However, we hit a snag on the XServe.  The XServe has an Atto SCSI card  
in it with 2 interfaces.  The CD drive in this XServe is not a burner  
(if it is, we'll be surprised).

The system would boot but it would complain that it couldn't find the  
root device was the complaint.  Odd, because it was booting from that  
drive, after all!

We noticed that when it was "scanning" for SCSI devices, the firewire  
drive wasn't reported when it was found like it was with the iBook and  
PowerBook.  We scanned SCSI 0 and 1.  Well, that made sense, because  
the Atto is SCSI 0 and SCSI 1.  So we added "scanning" for SCSI 2.   
Still no-go.

SCSI 3 did the trick.  So we have the initrd boot process looking for  
32 SCSI devices on SCSI 0-3.  That did it.  The Atto is 0 and 1 and the  
firewire drive is 3.  We have no clue where 2 is referring.  Perhaps  
someone who knows the kernel and boot process better does.

Perhaps with more checking I'd have the answer, but I'm not running  
that firewire drive right now, so I cannot tell.  I should be working  
with it tomorrow so I may respond to this message then with more  
detail.

Hope this helps someone out there to save some time :)

-Michael