AT&T 6386E/33: NO DIAGNOSTICS??!!

[~XT6561110~Frank McGee~C23~L25~6326~]

In article <3215 at infmx.UUCP> aland at infmx.UUCP (alan denney) writes:
>In article <3190 at infmx.UUCP> aland at infmx.UUCP (alan denney) writes:
>>I just started unpacking our brand-new 6386E/33 WGS, and guess what 
>>I find?  The Customer Diagnostics diskettee, which the manual says is
>>enclosed, is missing.  Instead, there is a *mail-in card* that I am
>>...
>
>The latest word from the sales rep is that, contrary to the
>documentation, most of the basic diags are built-into ROM and
>callable using CTRL-ALT-INS (hey! just like Zenith!), but
>that other key diags like the disk partitioning software are
>still not shipped with the machine (ouch).  Still pretty scary.

You're okay except for the last two lines.  Disk partitioning
software is usually part of the operating system (MSDOS/OS-2/Unix).
Presumably you'll be putting an operating system on the
machine that will have some sort of FDISK command.

All AT&T machines ship from the factory with the hard drive
already low-level formatted so you shouldn't need a low level
formatter, and your CMOS should already be set up.  If you
need to edit your CMOS and don't have diagnostics, you can
press ALT-CTRL-INS and bring up the ROM-based CMOS editor.
Note that you can only run the ROM-based editor during boot
wait (while "Booting Unix......" is displayed) or under MSDOS.
As far as CMOS editing goes, the ROM-based editor and the
diagnostics have the same capabilities.

The features you lose by not having the diagnostics are :
	- "friendly" CMOS editing
	- hardware diagnostics
	- low level formatter
	- auto-configuration of ESDI drives

For those thar are wondering, you can enter the low-level
formatter by pressing ALT-F while in the disk utilities
sub-menu.  It can only low level format ESDI disks.

-- 
Frank McGee, AT&T
Entry Level Systems Support
attmail!fmcgee (preferred)
att!cuuxb!fmcgee (those that can't reach attmail)