When I originally installed Debian 2.0 from CD I could swear that my SCSI tape drive on my ncr53c8xx SCSI host adapter was seen and reported at boot up time. I eventually compiled up a custom kernel and since I never use the tape drive (I mean, what could happen to my files on disk anyway?) I stopped looking for the message and I don't know if was ever there after the installation of my custom kernel. Anyway ...
I attached my Zip Plus to the external connection of the ncr53c8xx after my NT box blew itself to smithereens (software-wise) and now I wanted to actually use SCSI. I recompiled my kernel to include SCSI disk support and rebooted. No luck on the Zip. After some cursing, browsing, searching, thinking and reading (in that order) I did an 'insmod ncr53c8xxx' and viola I could use the Zip drive. Then I thought - how could my tape drive be working if I had to load the SCSI adapter driver manually? I rebooted, watched the messages and then tried the tape drive with a quick tar. No luck. So neither my tape drive nor my Zip Plus (both on the ncr53c8xx) were available automatically after a boot. All the SCSI stuff was configured as modules so ... curse, browse, search, think, read .... I added the line "alias scsi_hostadapter ncr53c8xx" to /etc/conf.modules and the line "scsi_hostadapter" to /etc/modules just before the line "st". I rebooted and now the devices are available automatically after a boot. But ... why did I have to add the lines? If "st" was already in /etc/modules would modprobe not automatically load the modules it depends on? Would it not depend on ncr53c8xx? I tried a quick "depmod -a" to rebuild the dependency file but this did not help - still needed the explicit line in /etc/modules. So the question is: Is something wrong with the dependencies or is this the way it is supposed to work? And second, is what I did the best way to make the tape drive and the zip drive automatically available? Any information welcome! ---- Ken
