(I'm sure Manuel could help you better on this, but since
it's already late here in Europe he may be offline by now,
so I thought I'd try to chime in in the meantime...)

Before you can access your drives in any way the card has
to be recognized by your kernel at boot time, which seems
to be not the case.

Your dmesg output should contain something like

     aha0 at isa0 ...
     scsibus0 at aha0
     sd0 at scsibus0 ...


There could be several reasons for the failure:

- Your kernel doesn't include support for this card

   Unlikely, since every GENERIC kernel has the support
   by default.

- The jumper settings on your card don't match those
   expected by the kernel

   Could be the problem here; this card seems to be
   highly configurable (I don't have such a card)

   The (GENERIC) kernel searches the card at IO ports
   0x330 or 0x334, so you have to make sure your card
   is jumpered to one of these (or you will have to
   build a customized kernel).

- The settings of your card conflict with any other
   piece of hardware in your system

   Check that none of the "irq"s, "drq"s, ... from your
   dmesg (or possibly from other unrecognized cards if
   there are any) match the settings of your card. You
   may also have to reserve the interrupt in your BIOS
   setup.

   (Look for something like "PnP/PCI Configuration",
    set "Resources controlled by: manual", then "IRQ-x
    assigned to: Legacy/ISA". )

- Any other reason I didn't think of... (Besides some
   broken hardware.)


I hope this gets you a bit further.

(I'm off to bed now...)

Tom




JS wrote:

> Hi Manuel,
> 
> Well, I tried to use those tools for the drive numbers
> you mentioned, but it either comes up with "Unknown
> special file or file system" or something like "Device
> not configured." What could be causing the issue? Is
> there any way just to tell that the machine recognizes
> the card and the attached devices without having to
> mount them?
> 
> Thanks,
> J Silverman