It would appear that a sensible approach to building a computer with a SCSI RAID is to install an IDE drive onto which Debian GNU/Linux is installed. The appropriate driver for the SCIS RAID is then installed after Debian is functioning. The driver for the SCSI RAID is dpt_i2o.o, obtained from the dptdriver-2.4.tgz archive at linux.adaptec.com. The correct one (for kernel 2.2.19) was copied to the appropriate modules folder after upgrading the kernel to 2.2.19:

# mount -r /dev/fd0 /floppy # cp /floppy/boot/dpt_i2o.o /lib/modules/2.2.19/scsi # umount /floppy # depmod -a # insmod dpt_i2o

Then dpt_i2o.o is listed in /lib/modules/2.2.19/modules.dep (thanks to the depmod command) and the RAID disk is accessible. There were some unresolved symbols but these seem not to affect the drive. (The choice of kernel 2.2.19 was dictated by the available kernel-images in Debian and the available drivers for specific kernels from Adaptec.)

To mount the drive add the following to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda1 /raid ext2 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 0

Then create /raid and mount the RAID disk:

  # mkdir /raid
  # mount /raid

Also add dpt_i2o to /etc/modules so that the RAID is available when the machine boots.