gvokalek@augean.ua.OZ.AU (George Vokalek) (07/22/90)
Thanks to those who responded to my previous request for help.
I have now successfully installed the ISC 2.2 OS, but none of
the fancy packages.
My problems were:
1) Incompatible VGA card caused memory corruption during
installation (!!!), which in turn caused NMI traps
to fire and bomb the installation. I have been told
that the EXPERT VGA CARD BIOS V1.03 is riddled with
roaches, and I will report again after I have installed
a newer BIOS.
I also tried a generic EGA card (C&T chipset), which
caused the machine to scram at the point when it should
ask for the install disk. The ISC vendor then remembered
that C&T EGA chipset is 'bad news'.
I tried Everex Mono Card which also did not work.
I finally found a generic Hercules card which worked!
I am using that at the present.
2) I am running a Miniscribe 9780E 780Meg drive with a
WD1007V controller. This drive has 1661 cyls, 15 heads,
and 53 sectors/track. This causes DOS problems since
DOS can only understand up to 1024 cyls. Therefore, under
DOS I used DiskManager V4.02 to fix it.
ISC 2.2 happily says '1661 cyls, rounding to 1024, but dont
worry, Unix can handle it!'. However, at the stage
of creating /usr2, I get the following:
PANIC: athd_int never got non-busy, got 0x000000D1
Trying to dump 1952 Pages
Now, unless floppy disks have improved since I last looked,
you won't be able to dump 1952 pages on an almost full one.
At this point, I RESET and took my chances with having
the INSTALL disk revalidated at next boot. The system could
not be shutdown after this panic (maybe it can, after a couple
of hours of dumping pages - I didnt wait).
I get that PANIC every time I use cylinders above 1024.
Is there a solution so that I can use the remaining 40% of my disk?
3) The 9780E drive has about 160 errors supplied on a printout.
After 20min of typing them in, ISC's installation program
said:
NOTICE: no space on floppy disk unit 0, partition 0
Several other messages appeared, all to do with the fact
that there was not enough floopy space for processing (sorting etc)
all the errors.
I was *NOT* impressed, since I will have to re-enter these
errors at some stage.
Why do ISC only use 76 tracks on their INSTALL disk? If they
used all 80, this problem would not have arisen!
After 4 days of frigging around with ISC, I have only a basic Unix up.
I am not impressed. All of the nifty hardware which worked under DOS
seems to choke ISC. At least the motherboard isn't incompatible (touch
wood), but everything else seems to be!
The worst thing is the snail-like speed at which installation proceeds.
One mistake and it will take 20 minutes to restart and get to the
same place.
Question:
Are any of the you running a 1024x768x256 super-VGA card. If so,
please mail me the details so I don't buy another dud. I will
post a summary.
It seems to me that ISC deserve a 'user supplement to installation'
which I will start writing once I am installed properly.
..G..