I have been having trouble with SCSI Controllers.
I got this Pentium System with an AHA-2940 Controller. The aic7xxx driver
is apparently not being maintained so no bugs were getting fixed. These
bugs were not killers, just little things like:
o System crashes when you execute ls on a MS-DOS file system if
the partition size is greater than 500 megabytes. These things
were reported by myself and others during the past year.
o System crashes when I attempt to use an EXABYTE tape drive. This
was explained as a fault of the controller to properly handle
disconnect (EXABYTE doesn't run sync and doesn't disconnect).
Anyway..............
So therefore, I spent a lot of money and bought a Bus Logic BT-958
SCSI Controller. This had been recommended because, amongst other things
"It had the best written Linux driver"....
Last night it trashed 3 file-systems, two were not even mounted. The
Linux root partition was not recognizable as a file-system of any known
type. This is an ext2 file-system. My "/home/user" partition was not
repairable using e2fsck although I was able to copy scrambled files off
to a network file-server. Most are 'C' sources and can be repaired.
I'd suggest you have serious hardware problems if both the 2940 and BT-958 have
given you problems. The only way for an unmounted file system to be trashed
would be if either the controller is bad or if a SCSI WRITE command had its
data modified to point somewhere else on the disk.
Leonard