You didn't think that was the end of the story did you? Just read the old SCSI disks and that would be that. Nope. I got the kernel to recognize the adapter, and it even recognizes that there's a disk attached. But it won't let me access either. It's the low-level equivalent of having an option greyed out. It's there and the computer knows it's there, and can even talk to it, but I can't. I think it's time to swap in another controller. The operating system has apparently determined that this card has a serious bug and doesn't want me to use it. It won't read disks with more than 1024 cylinders. That's OK with me because the disks I want to read are smaller than that. But in their infinite wisdom the programmers determined that this should not be allowed. This is kind of the thing I was alluding to in my rants about making data safe forever. Having the data and having the hardware/software to recover it onto a more modern system are two completely different (and equally challenging) aspects of the problem.

It's reaching the point that maybe I should've started with. I still theoretically could unplug my new system disk and boot an old operating system off the old SCSI disk. The old operating system could not only read this card but could even boot from it. Copy everything over the net to another system and then put the machine back together again. I'm getting real tired of messing with it.

Nope. Tried that too. Found myself looking at a very broken windows95. Wow. Was that old. The linux disks needed a floppy to boot. That's right. Now where's that darn floppy... it's in the house, but I know not where. I would've never tossed it. Ever. I've all but given up. Three SCSI cards and win95 later and I'm no closer to reading my data. It's still ok. The data is still there. But it may have to await a point in time when I can figure out the jigsaw puzzle to retrieve it. Had an email request yesterday for some of that old data. Whaddyaknow. Found it on the web. At the Rochester Gas & Electric Corporation FTP site. My old data. Well, at least the files I'm looking for today. Go figure...