tony@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Tony Holden) (03/02/89)
I've got a problem that sounds fishy, maybe someone else has heard of it. Customer running 2.2.1 and has a Archive ctrl and Wangtek drive (60 meg) on a 286 clone clone. Has been running for 6 months with no problem. Suddenly tape drive starts to act up, tape streams to the end-of-tape without backing anything up. Ok so the tape system is acting up, back to the distributor. The distributor can't find a thing wrong with it. A conversation with SCO sez "upgrade to 2.2.3". Ok, upgrade. Install the update disks and the machine is dead. At the boot prompt it auto boots and then resets the system. Ok, bad update disks. Let's just install the full system. Installed and the same thing happens, reboots the system. Sh*t, can't find a 2.2.1 disk to get them back and running. Whew, found a boot 2.2.1 boot disk. Now we have a hybrid system but at least it's running for now. Any clues on why a running tape system suddenly stops working (software?) Any clues on why 2.2.3 causes a machine to auto-boot and then reset? BTW, I used *MY* copy of 2.2.3 to be sure that it wasn't a bad batch of disks. By the time I finished with this mess it was 4am. This should have been a 2hr job at the most. HELP! Tony Holden "This space tony@killer.dallas.tx.us for rent."
hwh@cup.portal.com (Harold W Hankins) (03/04/89)
I can't help with the tape problem, but the boot problem I can. The program "/boot" on 2.2.3 has a bug in it so that on some computers it just continuously reboots. If you have 2.2.1, the fix is easy, use the /boot off the 2.2.1 N1 disk. If you don't have 2.2.1 lying around, you're probably out of luck. The proceedure is to load 2.2.3 normally until it starts rebooting, then insert the 2.2.1 N1 and hit reset or turn power off and on. After you get the boot prompt from the floppy, enter "hd(40)xenix" and press return so it uses the kernel off the hard drive, but the 2.2.1 boot off the floppy. Go into system maint mode, mount the floppy (mount /dev/fd096 /mnt -ronly), and copy the /boot from it to the hard disk (cp /mnt/boot /boot). Dismount the floppy (umount /dev/fd096), do a haltsys or shutdown, and it should now boot off the hard disk fine. Hank Hankins hwh@cup.portal.com Point of Sales Systems, Inc Camarillo, CA