wayne@csri.toronto.edu (Wayne Hayes) (10/20/90)
This is only marginally related to Minix, but I'm sure someone out there in MinixLand will have some brilliant insight to this problem. I'm at a loss. I bought a new 386/33 about 2 months ago and I've been having HD problems while in DOS the whole time. My dealer has tried 3 different hard drives (2 100M Conner's and a 91M Fujitsu) and 2 nameless HD controllers. What happened was that it wouldn't boot in 33MHz mode at all (with "turbo" switch off it's 25MHz) and the HD would fail nearly immediately *any* time I accessed it at 33MHz. The clincher is that all this was in DOS, and all this time Minix worked fine. (No sarcastic remarks here, please :-) Then I realized that the only diff between DOS and Minix wrt to HD was that DOS uses the BIOS and Minix doesn't. So then I recomile minix to use bios_wini.c, and the HD failed with the same errors after about 10 minutes of use. The failure is usually read or write error. So that seemed to point at the BIOS chips, but my dealer didn't have any BIOS chipes for my motherboard, so I got a new motherboard. I fiddle with it in the store (as always), it seems to work fine, I get it home and it fails within an hour with the same read/write errors. So now I'm confused. The only things that haven't been replaced are the video card, the serial/parallel card, the floppies and the power supply. [and the case :-) ] Does anyone have any ideas? If not, I'm just going to demand that he give me an entirely new machine. Please respond via e-mail to wayne@csri.utoronto.ca or wayne@csri.toronto.edu, I'll post a summary if there are any brilliant ideas. -- "Dad, what should I be when I grow up?" "Honest." -- Robert M. Pirsig, _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence_. Wayne Hayes INTERNET: wayne@csri.utoronto.ca CompuServe: 72401,3525