davidg@cory.Berkeley.EDU (David Gaertner) (07/30/87)
[I'm not superstitious, but I do believe in line eaters....] I have two Compaqs 286 which are the versions that have 3 speeds: 6 Mhz (common), 8 Mhz CPU with 6 Mhz I/O (fast), and 8 Mhz for both CPU and I/O (high speed). When I set the first Compaq to high speed, it worked just fine. The second one, though, just crashed after a couple of minutes, showing nothing but a cursor on the monitor (and the monitor looked as if it lost its vertical hold). Rebooting had the same results over and over again. Both systems are identically configured so I tried switching my JRAM memory boards, and the bad machine still acted badly. I even went so far as to back up the bad machine's hard disk and restore it on another machine, but the software worked fine on the other machine. I read something about early Compaqs having a DMA problem, so maybe that is my problem. So my question is, is that the problem? Is the 8 Mhz I/O speed too much for the (buggy?) DMA chip I have? If not, or if so, what can I do? I would really appreciate some info from people who have dealt with this problem before. And, no, the simple solution won't work: I have to use the high speed mode, not the common or fast modes. Thanks in advance.... David Gaertner davidg@cory.Berkeley.edu via ucbvax The best .signature is no .signature at all!