gerson@parc.xerox.com (Dan Gerson) (09/05/90)
I've posted this plea for help before without any response, but I've tried a few more things since then, so here's my final plea for help before I have to go through the purchasing department and tell them I can't get A/UX to install. I'm trying to install 2.0 on a (plain) MacII without much success. A long time ago I sent out mail summarizing my silly attempt to install 2.0 from the floppy distribution without having the A/UX Accessory Kit. Well, now I have the accessory kit, and I'm still failing in the same way. The bottom line is that the first phase of the installation goes ok, where the partitions check out, the file systems are built, the critical files are installed, and read-disk loads the kernel onto the root. The next step in the installation is to boot A/UX from the A/UX Startup application, where it should eject the kernel disk, start up A/UX, and then go into the second phase of the installation where it reads in the 30 some installation floppies. However, what is happening instead is that the A/UX launch loads the kernel, but when it transfers control from the MacOS to the A/UX kernel, the screen flashes once, but then the machine hangs with the screen staying a blank grey. Any inserted floppy does not get ejected (and no, the problem is the same if there is no floppy inserted). The interrupt switch on the programmer's switch does nothing if that means anything to anyone. I'm using a 600MB CDC Imprimis Wren drive formatted with LaCie's Silverlining. (By the way, there are some bugs with Silverlining and 600MB drives, where Mac partitions above 524MBs fail to be written properly. But that's another story.) I've eliminated some variables by simply trying to install A/UX using a freshly formatted disk with just the 50% Mac/Unix default installation, and the Mac partition initialized exactly as per the installation instructions (i.e. a fresh 6.0.5 system loaded from disk and the A/UX Startup disks copied onto it). To eliminate some more variables, I've removed the internal SCSI drive, removed all other SCSI devices, and made the CDC drive unit 0. I've also removed all random ADB devices except for the Apple extended keyboard and mouse. In a fit of paranoia, I even removed 4MB of memory (since it was 1MBx9 memory (i.e. with parity), leaving 4MB of Mac 1MBx8 memory). I even had the CPU board upgraded to a new MacII board in case my Mac had the PMMU or NuBus board problem. I removed all NuBus boards except for the Apple 8-bit color board, and moved it into the leftmost slot (I normally run with it in the rightmost slot for the few times I've used Virtual). By the way, the MacII works fine with A/UX 1.0.1. All this to no avail. About the only thing left is that I somehow managed to damage either the floppy root disk or the kernel archive disk when I was trying to install A/UX prior to my having the Accessory Kit. Pretty much the only thing I did was to mount the floppy root disk under A/UX 1.0.1 to examine it, but I didn't do any writing. Of course, UNIX might have, but I doubt that any file contents were changed, and the first phase of the installation using that disk went ok. Looking around with SASH, the root directory files look like one would expect them to. I also mounted the kernel archive disk so that I could use cpio to copy the kernel onto my A/UX 2.0 root disk using A/UX 1.0.1. But that shouldn't have written to the kernel disk, but again, one never can be sure. (Of course, now that I have the accessory kit, I used the read_disk script to read the kernel disk into a freshly reformatted drive as described above.) The only thing I can think of doing at this point is to get my dealer to replace the floppy disks. I'm suspicious that this might not work since we had a summer student intern here who said that he brought his A/UX 2.0 disk into work and tried it on some other lab's MacII, and he said that it failed similar to my description. Which is why I upgraded my CPU board, but unfortunately he left with his disk before I could try it on either my pre- or post-upgraded system. Of course, the other MacII might have the classic PMMU failure, but at this point I'm not convinced. So, how is one supposed to proceed? This is the only forum I know for assistance since my dealer just get's a blank expression when I try to talk about this, and Apple appears to refuse to help unless I purchase a annual support contract (which we might be forced to do). I'm convinced I have a pooka, but I haven't seen any big rabbits around lately. Thanks, Dan Gerson Xerox Palo Alto Research Center