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Note 7447.0 Starion 942 Horror Story No replies
PKGSRV::pto1038_port7.pto.dec.com::MitchBrown "brow" 48 lines 20-MAY-1997 16:31
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I am sorry to report that I have a horror story related to a Digital Starion
942. It is mine. I purchased this system at a Servicenter Sale. To
understand the horror story, I need to explain some background.
I recently purchased some game software (diablo, to be precise). It runs just
fine on the system - but a friend of mine noticed that it runs really, really
slow. I've got 40MB of ram on the system, so I know that isn't the problem.
I obtained a buslogic SCSI adapter some time ago to do tape backups to my TLZ07.
I also have a couple of RZ28s on the SCSI bus that I use to supplement the
internal IDE drive.
My system is a Digital Starion 942. It has 2 built-in IDE controllers. There
is one IDE drive connected, a 1.6GB Western Digital drive. On the Buslogic
SCSI card, I have connected three DEC RZ28 drives (2.0GB each). I have no
trouble accessing any of these drives.
What I wanted to do was to configure the system to boot from the SCSI adapter
rather than the IDE adapter. This way, I could build a new configuration and
be able to switch back to my previous boot disk any time I wanted. I went round
about with Buslogic technical support and eventually learned that in order to
make it work, I had to disable the IDE drive. This was accomplished by going
into the Phoenix BIOS setup and changing the IDE master drive 0 type to "NONE".
Now, on to the horror story. I booted from a floppy, and the bios reported no
internal drives. The scsi adapter hooked up the SCSI drives as drives C, D, &
E. I used FDISK and FORMAT on the "C" scsi drive. This appeared to work.
I SYSed the scsi "C" drive, and it appeared to work. I then attempted to boot
from the newly formatted and SYSed drive. It hung on the boot. I then
rebooted with the floppy, and it looked like the SCSI drive was garbage.
I figured it might have had some bad blocks (that's what SCANDISK told me).
So, I decided to rerun FDISK and FORMAT, then do a full SCANDISK scan. The
FDISK went fine. When I ran format, it said: Formatting 2.004GB (obviously
the SCSI RZ28 drive). After watching it go through about 30% of the drive, I
heard the internal (IDE) drive making noises. I then noticed the RZ28 drive
activity light was not on. I immediately cancelled the format, went back and
reenabled the IDE drive, and found that it had been trashed.
Somewhere, there is a serious problem. I suspect it is in the BIOS somewhere,
but I have no idea where to start looking. The buslogic people seem to think
that would be a Phoenix BIOS problem rather than the Buslogic adapter. I'm
inclined to agree.
I would really like to hear some ideas on why this happened. Any guesses?????
The upshot of the story though, is that I did get my original problem fixed.
The performance problem went away after a fresh install of Windows 95.
I didn't anticipate the solution being so extensive, though. ;-)
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| I think .2 is right - just setting drive 0 to none doesn't turn it off
- you have to disable the IDE controller in the bios to prevent the
controller from checking to see if the drive is there. When it checks
and finds a drive, maybe it auto types what it finds. Note that
disabling the IDE controller in the bios may not free up the IRQ and
DMA it may use - I think Windows sometimes assumes via PnP that the
controller still owns the resources, but the controller is bad/unavailable.
I have also tried deleting the controller from the system device list, but
even though it is disabled in the Bios, it always comes back on the
list - this is the case when attempting to disable the secondary controller,
anyway. Maybe disabling both IDE controllers would have different
results...........................Jon..................................
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| There is a disable in the BIOS (on the Advanced, Advanced chipset
controls menu). Under Win95, the controller will still show up,
but if you check in the properties you'll see that its disabled
(also frees up the resources). When you disable the IDE controller
in CMOS,
For this to work, you'll have to disable the IDE0 and select the disk
as NONE. You'll also only be able to boot from a DOS boot disk (Win95
bootdisk does not appear to work).
regards,
glen kelley
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