arend@knyper.prl.philips.nl (Arend van den Brug) (05/23/91)
Hello you netters, I have one major very disturbing problem. I have used PC's for quite some years now, repaired a few, but now I have a bug I cannot locate. My system is a 286 running at 20 MHz with a busfrequency of 10 MHz (this might be important for the hdiskcontroller), using some NEAT chips. One month ago I upgraded from a 40 MB MFM drive to a 120 MB IDE drive (and had to exchange my MFM hdisk controller to IDE as well). Memory installed is (since about the same time) 3 MB extended and 1 MB expanded. After installation I used some memory checking programs to see if this new memory is working correctly. It came out free of errors. I ran some tests with the new harddisk as well and this came out free of errors too. Now my problem: If I link some of my (or someone else's) program modules with the linker that came with MSC 6.0 (the DOS link.exe v5.10) then it is capable of producing an executable with illegal instructions in it. CodeView will produce such a message BEFORE it reaches the main. This indicates some kind of error in writing the executable. Now the hard part: if I make the executable again, it sometimes will give a correct executable sometimes not (it looks like it is sheer random). The IDE drive used is a MicroScience 7000-20 120 MB drive (quite fast) and has according to the reference list from F.Robert Falbo, a cache memory of 32 kB installed. I removed all resident programs and linked the executable again as to discard any software errors (I use a caching program like ncache-s). And I still get these weird illegal instructions. A diff of the 'illegal' executable and a working version will produce quite a list of differences. Can anyone give me a hint as to what might be wrong here ? Is it software (could it be LINK.EXE) or hardware (disk-cache maybe, can I switch it off ?) ? Any pointers would be more than welcome, I have tried to solve this thing now for more than four weeks and I'm still getting nowhere... Arend /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ /\ Arend van den Brug /\ E-mail: arend@prl.philips.nl /\ /\ #include <disclaimer.h> /\ 'May the clockspeed be with you' /\