hgm@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu (Hal G. Meeks) (04/24/89)
This is so strange a problem, and is so inconsistent, that I have run out
of ideas (for now). See what you make of this:
The equipment:
A500 w/A501, replacement Phoenix power supply, Byte Box w/512k installed,
Progen genlock, 1080 monitor. The A500 has KS1.2 installed.
The machine is about a year old.
The scenario:
We recieved DPaint III. The program itself seems to be stable. However, if
boot with it, sometimes it crashes while loading (somewhere around LoadWB).
Other times, it finishes booting, but double clicking on the Dpaint Icon
causes the program to begin to load, and then suddenly die. Here's the
guru # : 00000003.0022E378. Breaking out of the startup sequence and
loading Dpaint that way works, but I noticed that at least on one occasion
it crashed on exit. Booting with a WB1.2 disk causes everything to work,
although my cohort reported that it "acted funny" (i.e. died) a couple of
times. I yanked the Byte Box, and tried to boot it again. Everything was
peachy. Now, I need to emphasize that it very well may not be a problem
with the Byte Box, as everything else seems to work as usual. I do know
that we have had our share of problems with the machine, with Agnes popping
loose , and blitzing a chip on the parallel port on one occasion.
This is the second WB1.3 disk we have used on this machine. The other
one was a copy of TV*TXT that I had updated to WB1.3. Interestingly,
it behaved in a similar fashion, until we discovered that booting it
from a cold boot caused it to work fine.
I have Dpaint III at home, and have had no problems with it. However, I have
a 2000, with an autobooting HD and KS1.3. I nuked Setpatch from the startup
sequence of our A500 copy, and it didn't help. I haven't done anything else
to it. I copied it with Turbocopy to see if there were any errors on
the disk. Nope.
I'm doing a memory test this afternoon, just in case.
I'm out of ideas. I looked at "MergeMem" to see if it might help, but
haven't done it yet. Plus, since my machine at home has no contiguous memory,
and I am having no problems, I doubt it will help.
I've called EA, and they lived up to their reputation. So does anyone have
any bright ideas?
--
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hgm@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu "Everything is a reaction"
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