From: hph@hphbbs.E.open.de (H.P. Heidinger, Essen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.coherent
Subject: Re: I need help installing Coherent
Keywords: ADAPTEC-Driver damaged in COH' V4.x
Date: 20 Dec 92 12:00:24 GMT
Followup-To: comp.os.coherent
Organization: HPHBBS-COHERENT User Conference/Germany (CUC-Ger)

In article <1992Dec15.163238.28817@adobe.com> cbenson@adobe.com (Craig Benson) writes:
>Hi:
>
>I just tried to install Coherent 4.0.1B on my system at home,
>and when I booted it, after installing the software off the
>first floppy, it booted the system, printed the serial number,
>then stopped (i.e. no more activity came from the system).  I
>then had to cold start the system.
>
>My system is configured as follows:
>
>	Orchid Superboard 486/VLB - 486DX-50 (256K cache, 16MB RAM)
>	Orchid VLB S3 chipset VL-bus video adapter (1MB RAM)
>	Adaptec 1540B SCSI controller (default configuration)
        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

  COH's ADAPTEC DRIVER IS DEFINITELY DAMAGED. Those MWC guys didn't
  perform controller initialzation in the driver but relied on
  defaults from the controllers firmware. These defaults are
  ABSOLUTELY INSUFFICIENT for any multi-user/-tasking operating system 
  as stated in many documents (XENIX, SCO, INTERACTIVE UNIX etc.).
  From the docs you can read clearly that BUS-on times greater than
  8 ys will definitely lead into floppy-I/O ill-behavior. This can go
  that far, that the floppy drives' heads banged against the spindle, since
  the floppy driver forgets about all its administration data (head,
  track and sector mapping), what I could observe when I was restoring
  multi-volume archives with the uninitialized AHA-1542B.

  ---
  Congratulations MWC-Guys -- your neatly OS can even destroy hardware!
  What a progress on the OS market!
  ---

  I wrote a tool called 'ahaset' that fixes the missing controller 
  initialzation at run-time, since the current kernel still permits 
  direct writes to hardware ports. Everybody who operates an
  AHA-1542B too, should request this tool -courtesy of CUC-Ger- with 
  a short mail.
  
  Now the bad news ...
     Setting Busmaster-DMA timing (BUSon/BUSoff) to decent values does not
     cure the problem with severe character loss on tty lines. I.e that
     each disk access clobbers tty-I/O severely even if one sets
     Busmaster-Timing to 'worst case' for the SCSI-Bus (i.e Bus-On=2ys,
     Bus-Off=64ys).

  From 'bad' to 'worse' ...
     Using 16550AFN chips on serial lines does NOT cure the character
     loss problem but makes it even worse, since whole FiFo buffers of
     the 16550AFN chip trashed in this case (can be observed from the 
     error counts in 'uulog' files, which are increasing to values 
     about 4 times as high) and thus UUCP connection will crash soon
     if you try using FiFo buffered SIO chips - impossible to work
     with, though.
     

>		Maxtor 213MB HD at ID 0
>		Maxtor 340MB HD at ID 1
>		Texel 3024 CD-ROM at ID 2
>	IDE/floppy/serial/parallel controller (I don't have the
>	make of the board; however, it is named the "B237 2S/1P
>	1G/FDD/EHDI Super IDE", made, I think, in Taiwan)
>		Maxtor 80MB HD
>		5.25 HD floppy
>		3.5 HD floppy
>		Com 1 is disabled
>	Modem card at Com 3
>	Fax card
>	Media Vision PAS-16 sound card (default configuration)
>
>While installing, the system looked like everything worked fine.  
>It was only when I tried to continue the installation that things 
>stopped.
>
>The partitioning of my hard disks are as follows:
>
>	Disk 0 (80MB IDE)
>		0 - 30MB DOS
>		1 - 50MB Coherent
>	Disk 1 (213MB SCSI) 
>		0 - 213MB DOS
>	Disk 2 (340MB SCSI)
>		0 - 100MB DOS
>		1 - 150MB Windows NT File System
>		2 - 90MB Coherent

   From your configuration it look, that you want the basic COH'
   system in an IDE environment. I'd recommend that you first try to
   install COH' on a minimum hardware basis (just floppy and drive #0)
   and then look if the problem shows-up again. Leave out the virtual
   consoles too in such a minimum configuration.
   

>As a side note, I'm having no problems running Windows NT or 
                               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
   Sorry - that's a completely different topic ... no ideas.

>[ ... ]
>_-_- Craig Benson
>cbenson@mv.us.adobe.com (at work)
>craig@cbsoft.boy.com (at home)
>(415) 962-6004
>
>ps:  running on the assumption that I am going to get this
>working, the install script only allowed me to set up 
>DOS access to one partition.  How do I set up multiple
>DOS partitions under Coherent?  Thanks again.

 Start with reading the man page 'doscp' and follow the "See Also"
 entries - that's the way to dig through UNIX docs, anyway ...


Regards, Peter
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