[SATLUG] booting problems on ISA machine

[Travis]

Hey I've got a strange thing.

The BSDs seem to not like my SCSI CD-ROMs any more so
I decided to try using them in a Linux box.  I have a
486 and stocked it all SCSI - both HDD and CD-ROM. 
Unforunately it only has ISA and VLB slots, so the
controller is an AHA-1542B, old but a standard at one
time.

I was going to install FC2 but it requires booting off
of a CD-ROM, and I don't think I can do that on any of
my SCSI controllers, much less the ancient AHA-1542B. 
So I went to debian and tried to boot off a floppy. 
Their stable-distro "rescue" floppy reports it uses a
2.2 kernel by the way - what's up with that?  Anyway,
it hangs right after the md driver probe, and
comparing that to other boots suggests its the SCSI
card probing that's hanging.

1) Do people have suggestions for distros other than
Debian?  I'm lazy with regard to this particular box
and want something that's easy to get running and
upgrade and won't require recompiling for days because
I really don't care that much about performance.

2) Do I need to provide some kind of args at the boot:
prompt for the aha-1542B?

3) I recall ISA DMA cards having a problem with memory
over 16MB, which was solved in BSDs by using something
called "bounce buffers".  This machine has 64MB
currently - is this a problem?  Is it possible that
this kind of work-around for old hardware has been
removed from Linux?  I doubt it since the boot disk is
2.2 but it doesn't hurt to ask.

Any other comments?

Thanks,
T


		
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