SCO Unix ® FAQ section

Installation FAQ

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

My AHA154x/174x isn't being detected

On some machines which were fast for their time (e.g. 486DX2/66), the timeout in the kernel routine that initializes the card may run too quickly, causing the system to not be able to use your host adapter. SCO has a fixed version of /etc/conf/pack.d/ad/Driver.o that increases the timeout value; this should cure the problem. This fix (in unx365b for Unix 3.2v4.0 and 3.2v4.1, or oda366b for ODT 2.0) is available from SCO's usual channels (see the administrative FAQ for info on ftp and UUCP access). Later versions of the operating system include this fix; it is not applicable to anything earlier than 3.2v4.0 and ODT 2.0. As a temporary fix until you can get this SLS installed, slow your computer down during booting (many machines have a Turbo switch which can be turned off).

March 2011:

Wow - that's late 1980's or so..

The major issue with SCSI and SCO was always drivers. SCO didn't create the drivers; that was up to the SCSI adapter manufacturer and of course as SCO sales declined, those folks were less interested in writing the drivers and if they did, certainly didn't want to spend much time in testing.

This situation would get more complicated when they made minor hardware revisions. If they didn't write a new driver, the existing driver might not work with what was the same model number controller. If they did, the newer driver might not work with the older hardware, or might only work if BIOS was updated - it could require a lot of patience at times.

Unfortunately, not all of these companies kept the older drivers available, so finding what might work could be quite a job and could be expensive in terms of time and frustration.

As IDE drives got better, I'd often suggest that SCSI just wasn't worth the trouble unless they really needed the extra performance or RAID.

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