pjh@mccc.uucp (Pete Holsberg) (09/26/90)
I have this nice AT&T 6386/33E with lots of RAM and a Consensys caching ESDI controller and an AT&T StarLAN NAU and an AT&T (really a WD7000-ASC) SCSI board that controls only a WangDAT. And they won't all work together! My VAR and I had a devil of a time getting the SCSI to behave itself because it apparently wants to have a bootable device connected to itself. It doesn't in my system, so after it boots its own ROM, announcing itself to the world, it just hangs. We "solved" this problem by playing with the address jumpers on the SCSI board. Originally, the VAR had been told that AT&T had TWO SCSI boards --a bootable and a non-bootable --but later AT&T took that back, saying that there's only one. So we looked for an address that was legal but that the system wouldn't find so that the SCSI boot wouldn't run. And we discovered that D0000 worked. During the install of the StarLAN s/w, I came to discover that the NAU as installed by my VAR also had address D0000 and the install s/w was unhappy. It said that address C0000 (how could it be off by 10000?) is used by driver kd and that I should choose another. When I shutdown and pulled the board, I discovered that it was jumpered not to C0000 but to D0000. To make a long story short, I decided to move it to B0000 (a DOS program tells me that high memory is free as follows: B000-B7FF CA00-EFFF ). Then, I tried to boot and the SCSI hung. So I went through each of the 16 possible SCSI addresses and none of them worked. Most failed with a hung SCSI, some conflicted with the video so I shut down fast, and 2 others gave weird error messages and didn't complete a boot. So I'm in a quandry. It seems that the SCSI is the problem, because of its apparent desire to have a bootable device on it. So do I trash it and the WangDAT (sob, sob)? Should I pull the ROMs (probably the two chips with paper stickers on them?)? Or what??? Thanks for listening, Pete -- Prof. Peter J. Holsberg Mercer County Community College Voice: 609-586-4800 Engineering Technology, Computers and Math UUCP:...!princeton!mccc!pjh 1200 Old Trenton Road, Trenton, NJ 08690 Internet: pjh@mccc.edu Trenton Computer Festival -- 4/20-21/91