scotty@ziggy.UUCP (Scott Drysdale) (11/21/88)
a funny thing happened to me today... i rebuilt my 5.25" drive interface thing (previously 3 ICs hanging off the end of a ribbon cable, supported only by tack-soldered wire wrap wire) to live on a perfboard, complete with connectors for everthing (power supply filtering, even!). anyways, after it got working, i decided to take a look at the +12 and +5 supplies going to the disk drive. of course, the point i chose to look at had both supplies right next to each other on a header connector - slip, ZAP! (got a nice spark). the amiga drives gronked (sounded like a recal), but the machine seemed otherwise was unfazed. i rebooted just in case, and things seemed ok. after playing with MOUNT DF2: and pcutils for a while and happy that my power supplies weren't overly noisy, i decided to call a few local bbses. for that, i use Access! - i use Diga! for usenet cuz it knows vt100 pretty well. anyways. access! comes up and after the screen is up, it goes to df0: (presumably for serial.device). task held.... the guru number varies, but it's either all-zeros with a 3 on the end, or a B on the end (address error or line-F opcode). puzzle a bit, try again. same thing. try diga!. no problem. after diga!, try access again. works. reboot. try access. fails. reboot. try dir >ser:. fails. reboot. try amigabasic terminal demo. fails. reboot. try online!. works. reboot. you get the picture. only Diga! and online! seem to like the serial device now, but the others are happy once diga! or online! have blazed a path to the device. i ran my insider ram test, it was happy (though i don't really trust it - testing testing 1 meg of ram should take more than 30 seconds). i have run lots of programs, tried 1.2 (all above was 1.3 with FACCII), tried FACClessness. same conditions. tried rebuilding my 1.3 disk and access! disk, but no change. i have run lots of programs that eat memory and do alot of work (games, compiles, large text edits, etc), and none of them fail. the condition seems to be to try to get the serial.device when the moon is in the right phase. anyone have any ideas? if i can find someone willing to play the chip swap game until i find it, where is a good place to begin? as i remember, the actual uart is inside one of the custom chips and the non-tx/rx lines go to one of the 8520's. (oh, and this is a 1000 - forgot!). --Scotty
scotty@ziggy.UUCP (Scott Drysdale) (11/21/88)
<trying to remove engineer boot from mouth> well, i took my machine apart and removed the insider. everything worked ok. replaced the insider, and things STILL worked ok. maybe i needed to reseat the insider. i moved from connecticut to maryland about 3 months ago, but i would have thought any mechanical problems would have raised their ugly heads within minutes after first powering up here. i did wait a few hours before concluding that it was fixed (with case on and all peripherals plugged back in) so as to not mistakenly ignore a heat problem. sorry for the wasted bandwidth, but that one really scared the excrement out of me for a while... especially since i'm expecting a hard drive sometime this week and will have another variable in the equation... --Scotty