toma@attctc.Dallas.TX.US (Tom Armistead) (11/28/89)
I am having a problem, maybe I can get some help here?
My hardware a Packard Bell 16mhz 386 with 4meg of ram (3801088 bytes available
because of Shadowing), an 80meg and a 20meg Seagate MFM hard disk with a Western
Digital WA2 controller, a 1.2meg 5.4" floppy, 2 parallel ports, 2 serial ports
(1 is an internal 2400 bps Hayes modem).
Here's my problem:
I just got a brand new copy of 386/ix 2.0.2. I can't get it to install on the
above hardware. From a cold boot I get "Booting the UNIX system ..." and when
the RAM available message should come up, the machine reboots. If I let it boot
off of the 386/ix floppy again, I get the same "Booting" message and when the
RAM available information comes, it prints on the screen at about 1 character
every 2 seconds, after about 45 seconds a message shows that says how much
RAM is available and how much is free (3801088 Avail. 3141632 free) then the
system reboots again, and again, and again ...
Now for the weird stuff...
I rebooted from my DOS diagnostic disk, ran all the diagnostics and everything
went fine. I rebooted from the 386/ix boot disk and it worked? I got to
formatting the hard disk and right in the middle of the formatting, the system
rebooted again acting the same as from a cold boot. I ran the diagnostics
again, rebooted from DOS and formatted my hard disk (from DOS), ran the
diagnostics software again and rebooted from the 386/ix boot disk and got into
fdisk, had all the partitions set up and when exiting, the system rebooted
again, acting just like from the cold boot. And that's where I'm stuck???
My mind is boggled. I have been running 386 XENIX on this machine for about
a year, along with DOS, VM/386 (386 DOS multi-tasker). I ran Microport 286 Unix
before that and never had any problems. I've run several 386 based debuggers
under DOS also with no problems.
Could anybody help me here, I haven't called ISC yet, but will in the morning.
Thanks in advance,
Tom Armistead
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Tom Armistead
UUCP: {ames,lll-winken,mit-eddie,osu-cis,texbell}!attctc!tomaroot@shiloh.UUCP (Admin) (11/29/89)
What type of video card are you running. I just went through a installation that had a old Herc color card. We went through 4 motherboards thinking that we had a compatablity problem. 3 days later, we replaced the old color card with a ega card (video 7) and the system booted just fine. I have yet to call ISC and report the problem (planning that today). It seems that at some point in the boot-up procedure that ICS looks at something doesn't like and reboots. You were lucky, it never printed anything out to the screen. It would re-boot about every minute or so. Try working with the hardware and see if the problem goes away. By the way - what type of vedio card are you running - This is just for my notes.... Kmoore -- shiloh Bellevue, WA
jackv@turnkey.gryphon.COM (Jack F. Vogel) (11/30/89)
In article <10361@attctc.Dallas.TX.US> toma@attctc.Dallas.TX.US (Tom Armistead) writes: > >I am having a problem, maybe I can get some help here? [ long description of installation problems deleted...] Tom, your problem sounds familiar. I have found that 386/ix is far more hardware sensitive than any other flavor of Unix for the 386/AT class machine. I also ran Xenix386 for quite some time, and Bell 3.0 for a while without any problems. But both ISC 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 installation diskettes would usually die or panic upon booting. The really odd thing about my situation is that when I did finally get a kernel to come up, and installed a base system, then rebuild a new kernel from the configuration kit, and then replaced that kernel onto the boot diskette it would boot everytime!?! This was the case with both 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 installation disks, it beats the hell out of me what is different with the default kernel and the one I would subsequently build, ISC support never really did figure it out either, I just finally got around the problem. Of course, your problem is slightly different in that you get these spontaneous reboots after coming up whereas if I would get a kernel to completely boot everything was OK. What I would suggest trying, is strip your machine down to bare bones configuration, take out the second hard disk, the parallel and serial cards, everything except video and your larger hard drive, and try again. You might even want to try configuring your memory down to 2M. Then if you can get a successful install make a copy of the boot diskette using dd: dd if=/dev/rdsk/f0q15dt of=/tmp/disk.img dd if=/tmp/disk.img of=/dev/rdsk/f0q15dt Or, you can even use DOS to do the copy. Then make a new minimally configured kernel, mount your copy of the boot (/dev/dsk/f0q15d) and replace the kernel on it. If your problem is similar to mine this new diskette should boot OK with your full hardware configuration. Be sure to guard it with your life :-}!! An alternative approach would be to doctor the boot diskette off another ISC system if you know anyone who is installed. One last observation, if that 20Meg disk you mentioned is an old Seagate it may well be to slow to be used by 386/ix. Good luck, hope you can get up and running. Disclaimer: These are my opinions, however valuable they may be :-}. -- Jack F. Vogel jackv@seas.ucla.edu AIX Technical Support - or - Locus Computing Corp. jackv@ifs.umich.edu