fmcgee@cuuxb.ATT.COM (~XT6561110~Frank McGee~C23~L25~6326~) (01/26/90)
In article <3215@infmx.UUCP> aland@infmx.UUCP (alan denney) writes: >In article <3190@infmx.UUCP> aland@infmx.UUCP (alan denney) writes: >>I just started unpacking our brand-new 6386E/33 WGS, and guess what >>I find? The Customer Diagnostics diskettee, which the manual says is >>enclosed, is missing. Instead, there is a *mail-in card* that I am >>... > >The latest word from the sales rep is that, contrary to the >documentation, most of the basic diags are built-into ROM and >callable using CTRL-ALT-INS (hey! just like Zenith!), but >that other key diags like the disk partitioning software are >still not shipped with the machine (ouch). Still pretty scary. You're okay except for the last two lines. Disk partitioning software is usually part of the operating system (MSDOS/OS-2/Unix). Presumably you'll be putting an operating system on the machine that will have some sort of FDISK command. All AT&T machines ship from the factory with the hard drive already low-level formatted so you shouldn't need a low level formatter, and your CMOS should already be set up. If you need to edit your CMOS and don't have diagnostics, you can press ALT-CTRL-INS and bring up the ROM-based CMOS editor. Note that you can only run the ROM-based editor during boot wait (while "Booting Unix......" is displayed) or under MSDOS. As far as CMOS editing goes, the ROM-based editor and the diagnostics have the same capabilities. The features you lose by not having the diagnostics are : - "friendly" CMOS editing - hardware diagnostics - low level formatter - auto-configuration of ESDI drives For those thar are wondering, you can enter the low-level formatter by pressing ALT-F while in the disk utilities sub-menu. It can only low level format ESDI disks. -- Frank McGee, AT&T Entry Level Systems Support attmail!fmcgee (preferred) att!cuuxb!fmcgee (those that can't reach attmail)