ISC won't install on 330meg ESDI

[Bradley W. Fisher]

Ok, I give up. I really do *want* to believe that Interacive's UNIX is a
viable solution for an operating system ... but here I am getting bit again :-(

The facts:
	16 mhz Intel 301 386 motherboard
	8 meg of ram
	Phoenix BIOS ver 3.03
	Wangtek 5099EK
	currently running 2 85meg MFM hard disks OK.
	ISC 2.0.2

The problem:
	Cannot get ISC to load onto new Maxtor 4380E hard disk with
	Adaptec 2322B controller.

The procedures and symptoms:
	Boot MSDOS, run debug g=c800:5 to use controller's BIOS for low
	level format routine. Ran 48 hour surface scan with Speed Stor,
	no problem, no new bad sectors discovered.
	Boot ISC, sees drive as 1224 x 15 x 36, ISC says you can't use 
	more than 1024 cylinders, so I tell it there are only 1024. Run
	fdisk, use 100% for UNIX, start cylinder 1, end cylinder 1021.
	Activate UNIX partition. Set up file systems, 60 cyl for swap
	(16 meg), 75 cyl for root (20 meg), 443 for usr (122 meg), 442
	for usr2 (122 meg). ISC creates root filesystem OK, labels it,
	and makes lost+found. Creates usr filesystem OK labels it, BUT
	the following error is displayed ...
	
NOTICE: free block read error on Primary AT Hard Disk DISK unit 0, partition 3

mount failed
mount of usr failed

	... and lost+found is not created. Then ISC merrily goes on trying to
	install files on the hard disk (great error checking in that script!).
	Never does try to create usr2.

Other goodies:
	The same system installs SCO XENIX fine. Installing with a 170 meg
	Micropolis 1355 (1024 x 8 x 35) works just fine too. All filesystems
	are created properly.
	I've tried everything I know of to make this work (like disabling the
	BIOS on the Adaptec,knocking down the number of cylinders a little more)	and keep getting the same results.

I'm not trying to do ISC bashing here, but no we don't want to spend several
hundred dollars to *maybe* get an answer from ISC to *solve* this problem. If
no one on the net has a clue as to what is happening here, we'll have to solve
this the way we've solved other problems ISC couldn't give us a good answer on 
in the past ... switch over to SCO XENIX. A least our money will be going 
towards a product I know will install and run on this configuartion the *first*
time. I would like to see this work though ... really ;-)

--
I'm just a wanna be UNIX guru (IJWBUG)               | Micro Maintenance, Inc.
						     | 2465 W. 12th St. #6
	   -== Brad Fisher ==- 		             | Tempe, Arizona  85281
     ...!asuvax!mcdphx!hrc!microm!brad		     | 602/894-5526