Problem installing 386/ix

[Jack F. Vogel]

In article <10361 at attctc.Dallas.TX.US> toma at 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 at seas.ucla.edu
AIX Technical Support	              - or -
Locus Computing Corp.		jackv at ifs.umich.edu