jcmorris@mitre-bedford.ARPA (Joseph C. Morris) (05/06/88)
I've recently acquired an Intel InBoard/386 card for the purpose of getting reasonable response time from an aging low-serial PC (the original 5-slot variety). So far, I haven't been able to get it to run the basic diagnostics at power-up. The symptoms don't make much sense to me. It seems to work fine as long as I don't have the expansion chassis transmitter card installed, but once the card goes into the machine (even if the expansion box isn't connected) then the EGA fails its diagnostics. The problems occur with any reasonable settings of the dip switches on the transmitter. The board inventory consists of an IBM floppy controller (original with the machine), the InBoard/386, an IBM EGA with 256K graphics memory, an Intel AboveBoard with 2M, and the IBM Expansion Adapter transmitter. The problem occurs with or without the AboveBoard card installed. The expansion box inventory isn't significant since the failure occurs with it disconnected. I've got a new 150W power supply. Reinstalling the 8088 and 8087 chip returns the system to full (if slow) operation, so it doesn't seem to be damaged boards unless it's the InBoard itself. Normal IBM diagnostics run fine (with the transmitter card removed) except that the cassette interface test fails as expected. Intel is looking at the problem, but apparently hadn't run into an attempt to install the card on a unit with an expansion chassis and so far seems to be rather baffled. Does anyone in NetLand know of any successful or unsuccessful installations with this configuration?