RED HAT 5.2 INITIO INSTALL FLOPPY

I've created a Red Hat 5.2 install floppy that incorporates the drivers for Initio 9100UW SCSI host adapters from Initio (version 1.01o). This install floppy (and the drivers) should also work with non-Initio boards that use the Initio chipset, such as the SIIG UltraWide SCSI board. In fact, that's the board that I've got.

To use this package, first download the file, which is a zip file containing initio.img, a 1.44MB floppy disk image; initio.html (the file you're reading) as documentation; and the driver source code in the subdirectory driver-source. You'll need to uncompress the files with PKZip, InfoZip, or a similar utility. You'll then need to write the initio.img file to floppy using Linux dd, DOS RAWRITE, or a similar utility. (RAWRITE should be present on your Red Hat CD in a directory called dosutils.) Use the floppy created from initio.img in place of the boot.img floppy from the Red Hat distribution and install in the normal way. The initio.img floppy includes (I hope) something close to the usual set of Red Hat drivers in the kernel image, so it will work for installing from an Initio-driven CD, and/or to an Initio-driven hard disk, even if another SCSI board or IDE controller handles other devices.

If your system uses the Initio board to handle hard disks with any vital Linux partitions, it will not boot after the install has completed. To boot, boot to DOS (using a DOS floppy, if necessary) and use LOADLIN (again, it's on the Red Hat CD) to boot using the VMLINUZ file from the initio.img floppy. For instance, if you've installed Red Hat 5.2 on /dev/sda6, you'd use the following command from a DOS floppy with both LOADLIN and VMLINUZ present:

  LOADLIN VMLINUZ root=/dev/sda6 ro

Once you've booted in this way, you can copy the vmlinuz file from the initio.img floppy to your /root directory and adjust /etc/lilo.conf to use the new vmlinuz kernel, then run lilo to enable these changes. Alternatively, you can copy the driver files to the kernel source tree (as described in the documentation in the source directory) and recompile your kernel with Initio support enabled, and use your new kernel.

• My Red Hat FAT-32/Joliet CD Creation web page contains a section on how to modify a Red Hat install floppy. To create this floppy image, I only had to re-compile the kernel; it was not necessary to re-compile the modules.
• Initio maintains a web site with drivers and other information. They may have a more recent version of their drivers than what I've included in this install floppy image.
• SIIG is one manufacturer that uses Initio chipsets in some of their products. As of early November of 1998, they have no Linux information on their web page.
• Red Hat, of course, makes the Red Hat Linux distribution.
• Cheap*Bytes and LSL both sell inexpensive Red Hat CDs. InfoMagic sells a somewhat more expensive CD set that includes several distributions.