From: "David Herron" <david@twg.com>
Subject: Re: Supporting *BIG* Drives <was: Adaptec 1742A on ISC-3.0>
Sensitivity: Personal
Encoding:  71 TEXT , 4 TEXT 
Conversion: Prohibited
Organization: The Wollongong Group, Inc., Palo Alto, CA
Conversion-With-Loss: Prohibited
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1992 00:48:17 GMT

[I woulda responded by e-mail but I don't think we have .UUCP addresses
 configured here & in any case .dom.ain addresses are much more replyable..]

david@twg.com (David Herron) writes:

>- Therefore the card *must* be put in compatibility mode to do
>  the installation.

And Raymond Shwake <shwake@nearside.UUCP> follows up:
	Could you post those settings? We've attempted to run ISC 3.0
	with an Adaptec 1740/42A with a humongo 2.1 GB Seagate. Installation
	goes fine, can even choose the SHELL option during initial setup.

The information's right there in the manualll...

IRQ:		11
BIOS Addr:	0xCC000
I/O Addr:	0x330
DMA:		5

This from the chart in "System Maintainence Procedures -- version 3.0"
in section 8.3 (around page 113).

Our drive is "only" 600 megs and it's working fine and without problems
even.  And we're mucho happy with the performance on this new system.  Going
from a 16 MHz '386 (8 megs RAM and 600 megs ESDI disk) to 50 MHz '486
on EISA (16 megs RAM and 600 megs SCSI) reduced the time to compile
our product from 10 hours(!) to 1.5 hours...

Dunno if things is any worse with hughmungo drives like 2 gigs.

I'm still running the SCSI card in 154x mode with the above settings.
I tried configuring it for enhanced mode, but the system refused to
boot then.  Don't remember the problem but was along the lines of being
unable to find the disk.  And after 1.5 weeks "wasted" in configuring
this system I'm tired of fiddling with it...

BTW,

The hard part of this configuration was to get it to function along
with the ESDI controller & drives from the old system.

Once the OS was installed on the SCSI drive I installed the ESDI card & drives
and told the firmware they were there.  The system then insisted on booting
from the ESDI drives and there didn't seem to be any way to convince it
otherwise.

OK.. so I started installing it on the ESDI drives thinking I could make
the /usr and /tmp, at least, be over on the SCSI drive.  The install program
got a signal 10 while it was fixing up files (after the core files had
been loaded) and the resulting system was unbootable.

So now the ESDI drives are sitting on a shelf in my office and we'll find
a use for them sometime soonish...  (Mebbe an SCSI<->ESDI controller...?)

Has anybody some insight into how to control which controller is the boot
controller?  Or anything along the lines which would let both sets of drives
sit in the same system?  (The system is an Everex 486 DX2/25 (50 MHz) EISA
system).  Or at least how to get the SCSI controller into enhanced mode since
that should make the system even faster..?

(I know how to make it really be a 174x.. how to get Interactive 3.0.3 to talk to
it in that mode is the problem.)


(Did anybody see the latest Computer Shopper and how they've defined "gigantic"
drives???  200 megs is gigantic??  How soon they forget ....)

(Reminds me of when I got my Trailblazer many years ago and realized that
the light marked "slow" was for 2400 baud & below.  What some modems call
slow was, then, simply aMAZing..)

<- David Herron <david@twg.com> (work) <david@davids.mmdf.com> (home)
<-
<- During the '80s Usenet's mantra was: "Not all the world's a VAX".
<- During the '90s I hope it becomes:   "Not all the world's DOS (ick)".
Newsgroups: comp.unix.pc-clone.32bit