From: demillo@juliet.ll.mit.edu ( Robert DeMillo )
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Notes from the SCSI trenches: My Installation nightmare with 3.1
Date: 10 Apr 92 20:36:09 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: M.I.T. Lincoln Lab - Group 43

OK, I've been reading everyone else's experience, here goes mine.

I have a DTK 386 33 Mhz machine. It has a 300 Meg SCSI drive 
with part of it Stacked using Stacker 2.0, the majority of the
drive (200 Meg) is uncompressed. I have (this is crucial) the
SCSI drive being controlled by a brand new Data Technologies
Corporation SCSI controller board.

I chose the auto-upgrade installation path, and began the 
installation. The first time through the installation, the 
system choked on the 4th diskette. I rebooted everything, and 
started again. Win 3.1 installation figured out that I 
had done an incomplete job, and picked up where I left off.
The remaining installation went pretty uneventfully, I rebooted
and saw 3.1 up on my screen for the first time. (This was Tuesday
evening.)

I began setting up house, moving things around, trying out old
programs to make sure they stull worked, and was relatively
pleased, until...while trying to install a new printer, I
received a General Protection Fault that locked up Windows. 
I rebooted, and tried to get back into Windows. Windows started
bitching about half of my groups (icon folders), complaining that
they were damaged, and I would have to remake them. I cleanly
exited 3.1, and got back in. This time, all of the groups were
present, and I could use them to my heart's content. I received
a few more GP faults, but nothing that brought the machine
down. I turned the machine off and went to bed.

The next day (Wednesday) I was expecting some incoming FAXes, so 
I left the computer on before going to work. When I got home, the
FAXes had arrived. I looked at them, and went to print them out.
I received a GP Fault complaining about my EPSON9.DRV. It locked the
machine up again, I rebooted, and everything was fine and I could 
print out the FAXes. 

When the printing was done, I began to examine the system again.
Things were definitely wrong! Programs weren't working, GP faults
were popping up all over the place, groups started *disappearing*,
and, the biggy, I received a GP fault coming from GDI.EXE. Uh-oh.

After waiting on the phone for 2 hours for a MS support staff guy, 
I started doing my own digging. When I got him on the phone, I 
presented my little theories to him, and he concurred:

The DTC SCSI controller board comes with a little TSR that shadows
the SCSI BIOS up into memory to improve performance. The new SMARTDRV needs 
to run in  double buffering mode for SCSI and IDSE devices. Apparently, 
the SCSI TSR does more than just shadow the BIOS, it must do its 
own write caching. The end result is that I had three write
caches running (2 from SMARTDRV and 1 from DTC). Naturally, after
a short period of time, these all got out of synch, and individual
bytes in the writable binaries and data files started getting 
messed up. I was slowly corrupting my disk.

I pulled the SCSI TSR out of the config.sys table, and just ran
SMARTDRV. I then did a virgin installation of 3.1 into a separate
directory, recreated my groups (be hand! ugh!), and copied what I 
trusted from the old directory to the new one.

I used the system for a little while since then, and I haven't had any
problems. However (!!!) I did get several GP faults, but these may
have been legitimate, since I was screwing around with control panels 
and installing drivers, printers, etc at the time. I also had a 
lot of weird processes running while I was doing this. (The German
"PerfMetr" program, for one, Central Point's CPLauncher for another.

The only thing remaining is: I can't get my mouse (microsoft) to 
work in the DOS windows as it should. (I think I have to pull MOUSE.COM
off the installation disk by hand, if I am reading my netters right.)

Any other suggestions or comments from the crowd would be welcome. I
do Windows development, and I want these problems ironed out before
I continue.


Thanks for listening...


- Rob

--
 - Rob DeMillo			| Internet: 	 demillo@juliet.ll.mit.edu
   MIT Lincoln Lab 		| Also Internet: rjd@brown.cs.edu
   Weather Sensing - Group 43	| Reality: 617-981-2105 (office)

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Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms