hadji@dasys1.UUCP (Toby A David) (09/24/89)
Since this is my first posting, please forgive any glitches.
Could any of you SCO 2.2.? 286 Gurus please help ?
I have been running SCO Xenix 2.2.1 for 2 years on a 10 mhz 1 wait state
AT Clone with an Award Bios and 3 meg of memory, A Miniscribe 6085 71 mb
28 ms Drive with a WD1003 2:1 interleave controller.
Sometime ago I changed the controller to a WD1006 1:1 interleave and as
with the old controller, the drive was diagnosed & initialized with
Speedstore, to override the CMOS table which has no entry for the
1024 Cyl 8 Head configuration.
These as well as the precomp (512) Landing zone (1023) 17 sectors,
were entered during the XENIX Installation and all was well.
I moved on to 2.2.3, and had no problems either.
A week ago the box was turned of by mistake, and upon reboot, while the
usual "fsck" was taking place, it ended up hanging.
I decided to "clean up" the drive, and reinstall both the DOS as well
as the XENIX systems on their respective partitions, as I have done
many times before. The SPEEDSTORE program scanned the drive and found
the same one bad cylinder that was always there, so that ruled out any
new damage tp the drive. DOS was given it's partition and installed
with no problems. All the DOS software as well as diagnostics of the
Drive/Controller etc performed well and as expected.
Here is what happens when I now try to install XENIX...
The parameters are entered, the partition is created and activated,
I proceed to do a quick scan, it scans about 3%, the drive led stays on
and the machine hangs. If I bypass the scan, it accepts the various track
allocations swap, u file system etc, attempts to creat the file systems,
and the hangs.
The following measures were taken to try and solve this disaster..
A: Various drive locations were used for the XENIX partition, including
the entire drive, in the hope that there still may be some undetected
damage on one of the Cylinders. The results were the same which
ruled out any drive problem.
B: The drive was initialized again with the old reliable WD1003 2:1,
SPEEDSTORE and DOS were happy, XENIX died.
C: Talked to SCO, they concluded I must have a bad Controller.
D: Went back to WD1006 1:1 and the old reliable 2.2.1, same story.
E: Talked to Western Digital and MIniscribe, discussing the reliability
of the Speedstore software, both agreed there is no problem.
F: Checked the memory, removed the extended 2 meg card removed all cards
but the controller, reinstalled DOS, all was fine, tried to reinstall
both releases of XENIX, same problem.
G: Checked diagnostics speed, drive configuration, etc. Did some praying,
and finally gave up.
Any thoughts Post or Email, would be welcome.. Thanks in advance
--
Toby A David
Big Electric Cat Public UNIX
..!cmcl2!{ccnysci,cucard,hombre}!dasys1!hadji