al@escom.com (Al Donaldson) (09/01/89)
A month or so ago I tried to get MINIX 1.3PM up on the hard disk of my old 6 MHz IBM AT. Its one of those 30 meg beasties that IBM came out with after they found out about the CMI drives, but its before they speeded up the clock to 8 MHz. For some reason or other at_wini doesn't seem to work right, although a friend tried bios_wini and found that it would work if he did a fsck from the boot menu or ran fdisk before trying to access the hard drive. At one time we thought it might be the controller board, but replacing the IBM Fixed/Floppy controller with a WD AT controller didn't help. I'm pretty sure the problem is not software, since the same system has been running for a couple months on my friend's clone. One of my reasons for sticking with this box (S-L-O-W as it is) was so I could be *absolutely* sure that there were no compatibility problems. After all, its true blue IBM, right?? So I find it more than a little ironic that I can't run the same MINIX system that my friend runs on his much cheaper and faster clone. Any ideas? There's a possibility of swapping the BIOS, but (a) its not clear if that would make any difference and (b) which BIOS to try? One suggestion was to sell this box to someone willing to pay extra $$ for a true blue system, and use the money to buy a REAL clone that will run MINIX :-). I will appreciate any help or suggestions. Al Donaldson (703) 620-4823