[221] in linux-scsi channel archive
Thanks for help: problem solved!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Chang Eric Y (214)509-3562)
Sun May 28 16:10:38 1995
Date: Sun, 28 May 95 14:08:09 CDT
From: ericc@Arco.COM (Chang Eric Y (214)509-3562)
To: linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu
Thanks for the reply. A lot of people had a lot of good ideas, but the
answer was staring me right in the face. It was the "burned out"
explanation. That is really strange, things usually don't burn out.
Here's how I found out. One of the system guys I talked to told me to
take the cover off the case, and turn the air conditioning down so low
that I will need a coat. I did this, and the darn thing started working!
I was even able to install Linux! After I did this, the machine failed
to boot off the Slackware setup prepared boot disk. I figured that this
was just more of the same problem, so I did the air conditioning trick
again. Suddenly, I noticed that the PAL chips on the Future Domain
TMC-830 controller were getting hot. And, even DOS was missing the
drive on setup. That did it. I pulled that lousy Future Domain/
Toshiba setup, and switched to a Quantum IDE. No problems at all
(except for a few with bad swap pages). Thanks for your help (and
everybody else's: Drew, Paul, etc). Eric
Here is an excerpt of my post:
>get forgotten. But, alas, I was not even able to return to the same
>point in the installation procedure. The installation bombed out at
>the boot image with a strange hard disk error. It detected more than
>one SCSI device. Of course, I know that I only have one, the hard
>drive. But sometimes it detects one at ID 4, sometimes three at ID's
>1, 2, and 3. When this happens, there is really no device there, so
>the installation bombs with a kernel panic. Alt-Ctrl-Del will not
>restart the machine, so I have to power down. Nothing has changed
>except the root disk since this was done successfully past this point
>the night before!!!! And, the installation has not even gotten that
>far. This looks like a hardware error, but I have no idea what kind.
>I returned to DOS (it still boots off the SCSI hard drive) and ran
>complete QAPLUS hard drive diagnostics. Everything's OK. So, I doubt
>that it is hardware. But on the other hand, I am not sure it is
>software either. It ran smoothly the night before. And it ran
>every time. There is the slight possibility that something burned out
>between the two times. Doubtful. I have worked on computers, and
>the explanation is almost never, "something must have just burned out."
>Besides, the diagnostics ran just fine. I hate to throw away a
>perfectly good SCSI drive, but I will if I have to. This thing is
