So, I’m trying to save the university some money and get new life out of old hardware. Putting linux on a circa 1997 Dell PowerEdge 2200 shouldn’t be this tough. I’m using gentoo, so I should be able to get this to work.

It runs fine on the stock Live CD kernel, but if I compile an SMP kernel with pentiumII optimizations and the current aic7xxx scsi driver, it locks up after a few minutes of being on.

So, after some searching on the forums, I decide to try the aic7xxx_old driver. Seems to work much better, problem solved? knocks on wood

Now I can move on to making this a useful box.