"Hugh_Messenger.EuroPARC"@XEROX.COM (11/15/88)
Folks,
I'm having severe problems getting Minix flying on my Mega ST4 with (non
Atari) hard disk. If I disconnect the hard drive (a Triangle Turbo 40Mb
drive from Soft Innovation) everything goes OK. As soon as the hard drive
is connected, the boot sequence fails due to a persistent fd0 timeout when
it attempts to read the root file system disk (10.ROOT).
My set up is: Mega ST4, colour monitor, Triangle 40Mb drive, SLM804 laser,
Dowtey modem on the serial port, Panasonic dot matrix on the parallel port.
I've tried disconnecting everything, and for all but the initial attempts I
had the hard drive plugged straight in the back of the Mega rather than in
to the SLM interface box. The hard drive is configured as dma device 7.
I've tried using rflop in the cli to create a minix.img ("rflop a:
c:\minix\minix.img 130000") and boot from TOS using minix.prg, but however
I try it (with or without hard disk connected, to/from floppy, to/from RAM
disk, to/from hard disk etc, altering the rflop parameters as appropriate),
when I run minix.prg it complains that minix.img is in the wrong format and
drops back to GEM. This problem seems to be unrelated to the hard disk (as
it still occurs with the hard disk unconnected), but I was kind of hoping
that the minix.img boot procedure would be a work around for my fd0 timeout
problem.
Anyone got any suggestions? If I can't use my hard disk, I can't use
minix, and I can't afford to go buy 2 Atari 20Mb drives to replace my one
40Mb unit (which hasn't given me any problems up till now).
Help!
-- Hugh
-- Hippo.EuroPARC@Xerox.COM
PS. Feel free to mail to the list, but please include my direct address -
I've only just gotten round to asking to be put back on info-minix after
changing my mail address a while ago, and it may take a couple of days for
my request to get processed.
PPS. Apologoies to info-minix subscribers, who will have been subjected to
this message over there as well."Hugh_Messenger.EuroPARC"@XEROX.COM (11/16/88)
BTW, the Triangle 40Mb hard drive I refered to in my last posting (fd0 timeouts when accessing the root floppy during booting if the hard disk is connected) has a custom disk controller based on the NEC ST506 / 412 chip set. I just talked to the manufacturer, and he is as puzzled as I am. He's sending me the specs for the controller, but I just can't think where to start looking for the problem. How can having a hard disk connected cause fd0 timeouts ... Any suggestions whatsoever gratefully received. -- Hugh -- Hippo.EuroPARC@Xerox.COM