From: sje@xylos.ma30.bull.com (Steven J. Edwards)
Subject: At last!  Success installing 4.0 on 386 SX notebook.
Reply-To: sje@xylos.ma30.bull.com
Organization: Bull HN, Worldwide Information Systems, Billerica, Mass., USA
Distribution: comp
Date: 23 Dec 92 17:21:38

Early in 1991 I purchased a 16 MHz 386 SX notebook from Zeos.
Manufactured by Sanyo but distributed under several different names,
the Zeos version of the notebook is a nifty looking 3 Kg black
anodized aluminum with a 25 cm diagonal 640 by 480 VGA display (four
bit gray scale sidelit passive matrix LCD).  It has a 1.44 Mbyte FD
and a 20 Mbyte HD (Connor IDE).  I ordered the "loaded" version for
US$3195 (a great price at the time!) and got a case, an extra battery,
and a spare charging stand.

Although it came with MS-DOS, this was quickly overwritten by Coherent
3.1 with a single partition spanning the HD.  I desperately needed the
machine to be able to read and write tar floppy disks so I could move
work to and from my ANSI C Macintosh environment at home.  Coherent
3.x worked fine and I used the C-Kermit package to move files to and
from my Mac Plus via the notebook's serial port.

I did have a slight problem, however.  I ordered the machine packed
with extra memory; two modules, each with two Mbyte of low power RAM.
The notebook had one Mbyte soldered to the system board and so topped
out at a total of five Mbytes.  This had worked fine with both the
boot diagnostics and MS-DOS, but there was a very slight problem with
Coherent 3.x; it seemed that a one Mbyte ramdisk ran okay but a two
Mbyte ramdisk would fail with segment violation traps suring program
loads.  I assumed that this was just a minor quirk of either the
ramdisk driver or the 3.x kernel, so I didn't worry too much.  Also, I
knew that one of the trusty techs at MWC also had a Zeos 386 SX
notebook and Coherent ran okay on it, although he hadn't reported
trying a two Mbyte ramdisk.  During the wait for 4.0 to arrive, the
warranty on the both of the two Mbyte modules expired.  I didn't worry
too much because I thought that 4.0 would fix or evade the 3.x
misbehavior and so I had no reason to return or exchange the costly
(US$249 each, I think) memory modules.

Well, Coherent 4.0 makes its appearance and, after a snag or two,
works fine on my new desktop 33 MHz 486 DX machine.  I purchased a
second copy for my notebook, but did not have time to do much with it
until recently as the 486 machine had taken over much of older
machine's work.  Unfortunately, 4.0 refused to install on the
notebook.  It failed predictably during installation near the end
where passwords are assigned to users; the sed script fails with a
segment violation.

I felt at first that this was a case of user error, and so I proceeded
to try just about every possible combination of BIOS CMOS
configuration settings.  (There are plenty of them, I assure you.)
Nothing of substance changed.  Noting the installation notes' warning
about "weak memory" (never heard of that), I tried pulling the upper
memory expansion module.  Wow!  Installation worked, well mostly, and
I got a running system albeit with only three Mbytes RAM.
Unfortunately, I later began to experience problems when editing large
files and I began to suspect the remaining memory module.  After many
more configuration trials and module swapping, I noted that 4.0 was
somehow failing with even just one module in place.  I removed the
second module and ran the notebook with only the standard one Mbyte
RAM.  At this point, system operation was okay, if somewhat limited.

A pause here to note that there are bugs in the installation script
for Coherent 4.0 for at least some machines with only one Mbyte of
RAM.  An attempt to uncompress and install the man pages fails
consistently.  I think that compress can't cope with the lack of
memory.

Back to the story.  I began to think that maybe the pricey memory
modules weren't really bad at all as they had never failed BIOS or
MS-DOS (3.x and 5.x) testing.  Perhaps Coherent 4.0 had some latent
bug that was tickled on my machine.  A call to the friendly tech help
at MWC resulted in a set of new floppy disks in the mail.

With the new disks, I again repeated by superstition dance complete
with the configuration permutation sequence and memory module
swapping.  Again, installation failures.  By then, I was so
frustrated, I thought about tossing the whole @#$%^&* thing out the
window.  If I hadn't paid so much for it in the first place I probably
would have gone for a try at the world record for the Under 5 Kg
Computer Throw.

Improbably, a more sensible mood took hold and I ordered a pair of
Sanyo 17NB two Mbyte modules just in case one or both of the Zeos'
units were bad.  Although these are now available for only two fifth's
the price of what I paid for the original set, I still feared it was
something akin to more "good money after bad".

Well, I installed the new modules.  Guess what!  The 4.0 installation
with the new disks worked!  Finally, I have a portable, 32 bit
addressing, Unix-like machine for my work.  Congratulations to both
MWC and Sanyo.

In fairness, I can't really be too upset with Zeos.  After all, the
chips did work for MS-DOS and that's all that Zeos said they would do.
I don't think that Zeos ever heard about Coherent until I told them
about it, and I doubt if anyone has tried any other non-DOS operating
systems on the 20 Mbyte HD notebook.  As the warranty ran out some
months ago, I can't force Zeos to refund my money for the extra
memory.  I'll let them know about this episode and maybe they'll find
some compromise.  Perhaps some MS-DOS user has a Zeos 386 SX notebook
that needs more memory.

So, for the Coherent users that have read this far, this story at
least demonstrates that MWC's warning about "weak memory" really does
hold true in some cases.  Too bad I was one of them, but my machine is
fixed now.

Best Wishes for all in the holiday season.

 [The above opinions expressed are my own; not necessarily held by others.]
      == Steven J. Edwards           Bull HN Information Systems Inc. ==
      == (508) 294-3484              300 Concord Road         MS 820A ==
      == sje@xylos.ma30.bull.com     Billerica, MA 01821          USA ==
"That Government which Governs the Least, Governs Best." -- Thomas Jefferson