farber@lindy.Stanford.EDU (Hank Farber) (06/07/90)
Pogo Possum writes that he has trouble with ISC unix on an old compaq desqpro. I write: I had a similar problem with a micronics motherboard that was a clone of the old compaq deskpro. A call to ISC got me the information that there is a problem with DMA on the early compaq motherboards. All sorts of flakey things happen when using the floppy drives, tape drive, and/or coprocessor. I would get hanging disk drives, panics, parity errors, core dumps, etc. I "solved" it by trading in the machine (still okay for dos) for a different clone with a different motherboard (TPE). Works great and no problems since. Unfortunately, I could not think of a workaround for the old machine, but I like the new one much better (much faster).