dmoyer@oiscola.Columbia.NCR.COM (Dan Moyer) (05/11/91)
I have a IBM clone using a ATI 386sx motherboard that inexplicably
crashes.
I've asked the question to the manufacturer, the dealer, and some
knowledgable people I know, and have not been able to solve this one.
I'm hoping someone on the net has had this problem and knows the
solution, (or at least knows that there is no solution to it- at least
that would be better than wondering if it can be fixed.)
PROBLEM:
When I exit Procom, and the turbos switch is set to 20mhz, frequently
the system will crash. When switched in 16mhz mode, this problem
rarely, if ever, occurs.
When in Windows enhanced mode, the system will crash. In this case,
there seems to be now particular cause. It appears to usually occur
when a disk I/O is starting. But it can also occur just when the
mouse is moved. Sometimes the screen will go blank and display an
error message (below), sometimes the system is just hung. When switched
to 16mhz speed, Windows will still crash, though less frequently.
When exiting Procomm, the display goes to 40 wide character mode,
and the following message is displayed:
INTERMITTENT MEMORY READ ERROR
SYSTEM HALTED
HARDWARE:
ATI 386sx motherboard. circa mid 1989
ST296N scsi drive and ST02 controller card
Paradise Basic VGA
Serial/parallel board COM1 IRQ4 COM2 disabled.
internal modem COM2 IRQ3
bus mouse board IRQ5
The BIOS chips on the ATI board are labelled:
ATI Inc AMI BIOS V2.02
Copyright 1987, 1988 AMI 386sx BIOS
The ST02 controller card has a ROM chip labelled:
Seagate ST01/02 BIOS V3.0
001
Copyright 1989 Seagate
The Paradise VGA card has a chip with the part # 62-003137-061 WDC '89
When I boot up the machine, I get the following displayed:
386-BIOS Atronics International Version 1.11 Sept 1989
Seagate SCSI BIOS Rev 3.0.0 Copyright 1988 Seagate
4M of RAM on the motherboard 70ns speed.
In the config.sys, I removed all TSR's and any disk cache stuff, and
Procomm will still crash when exiting.
As far as Windows, I put in the minimum- smartdrv.sys and himem.sys,
trying to keep system config as simple as possible.
Has anyone had problems similiar to this? Appreciate any help you
can lend.
Dan Moyer
dmoyer@oiscola.columbia.ncr.com
803-739-7681 work
jcmorris@mwunix.mitre.org (Joe Morris) (05/13/91)
dmoyer@oiscola.Columbia.NCR.COM (Dan Moyer) writes: >I have a IBM clone using a ATI 386sx motherboard that inexplicably >crashes. It may or may not be related to your problem, but I had trouble with Windows 3, in enhanced mode, on an NEC PowerMate 386 in which the system would either refuse to start Windows, or would crash with strange errors inside Windows. At times the symptom would be a loop; a three-finger salute would produce a memory error message and/or a report that CMOS was corrupted. The problem was solved by a new driver our people got through Novell; it involved conflicts for IRQ2. vpicda.386 replaces the internal driver *vpic in the [386enh] section of system.ini. Joe Morris