chaim@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Dr. Chaim Dworkin) (09/15/90)
This has been frustrating me for over 2 months now..... I am using a Zenith 386 with a 72 Mb MFM hard drive. Two months ago I obtained a Micropolis 160 Mb SCSI drive with a Always Technology SCSI adapter card. When I installed the drive and booted the computer, it didn't work. Zenith has a CMOS setup which is called by Ctrl-Alt-Cr key sequence and when I booted my computer it gave me the setup screen. Soooo.... I checked the various things which could conflict. The installation directions said not to tell the setup that there is another hard drive because the SCSI adapter card has its own BIOS which takes over for it. The Zenith MFM drive uses IRQ14 and the SCSI uses IRQ15. I tried IRQ16 also. My diagnostic program told me that IRQ15 and 16 are not being used so no conflict. Then I used DEBUG to look at where the BIOS goes in RAM. The SCSI card uses memory location C800:0 and I found that location free so there is no conflict there. The card's jumpers can be set so other memory locations are used and I tried that anyway but no success. Then I switched off the SCSI adapter BIOS, booted the machine with the card installed, switched on the adapter BIOS and dumped C800 and found the SCSI adapter BIOS there. But I could not address that drive. This is driving me crazy. When the SCSI card is installed and functioning the Zenith will not boot; it goes directly into the setup mode. I also cannot boot from a floppy from setup mode. Anyone have any ideas? What can I do short of tossing it? (The Zenith) BTW, I took the SCSI card and drive home, put it in my home-made 286 clone, formatted it, and used it with absolutely no problems. Only in the Zenith does the card give me any problems. Grrrrr...... Chaim Dworkin Internet: chaim@eniac.seas.upenn.edu -- Chaim Dworkin (chaim@eniac.seas.upenn.edu)
mlord@bwdls58.bnr.ca (Mark Lord) (09/19/90)
In article <29582@netnews.upenn.edu> chaim@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Dr. Chaim Dworkin) writes: >This is driving me crazy. When the SCSI card is installed and functioning >the Zenith will not boot; it goes directly into the setup mode. I also >cannot boot from a floppy from setup mode. A lot of VGA/SVGA cards, particularly the 16-bit versions, do not get along well with "neigboring" adaptors in the address space. Since VGA uses c0000-c7fff for its BIOS, your SCSI controller is immediately adjacent at c8000. Try re-jumpering it for D8000 if possible. This has something to do with the auto-detect 8/16 bit operation of the VGA cards. My Perstor (ADRT) controller had this problem, and even included instructions warning about it, along with a jumper to move the bios to c8000. Have fun. -- ___Mark S. Lord__________________________________________ | ..uunet!bnrgate!mlord%bmerh724 | Climb Free Or Die (NH) | | MLORD@BNR.CA Ottawa, Ontario | Personal views only. | |________________________________|________________________|