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Date:      Mon, 24 Aug 1998 15:57:34 -0400 (EDT)
From:      John Baldwin <jbaldwin@freedomnet.com>
To:        freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Hardware problems....
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSD/.3.91.980824114511.25542A-100000@freedomnet.com>

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Hi all, I've been having some hardware difficulties and I would 
appreciate any suggestions.  Here goes:

I have two computers, and both of them are misbehaving, so I'll go over 
them one at a time.

Computer 1
- AMD 486dx4/100 with 32 MB RAM
- Maxtor 234 MB and Quantum 162 MB hard drives
- VLB video card and multi I/O controller
- 3Com 3c503 8-bit Ethernet adapter

Problems:
- The motherboard BIOS supports LBA, but I'm not sure if the I/O card 
does.  I tried putting a 2 Gig hard drive in, and it worked ok at first, 
but then it started getting errors (status 50 and status 59).  The drive 
doesn't work in my other computer anymore (where it used to live) either, 
so I think that drive is bad.  I bought a new UDMA 2.8 Gig drive, and the 
BIOS detects the geometry correctly (cyls, heads, etc.)  but says that it 
is only 700MB in size.  The kernel gets the drive size right, and I did 
get it fdisk'd and label'd.  However, when I tried to write to it I got 
status 50 and status 58 errors.  On my other machine the drive worked 
fine, so I'm guessing that it is a problem with my I/O card?
- Originally I had one 3c503 NIc that I used to run BNC.  This machine 
acts as my gateway, so when my school got ethernet in the dorm rooms, I 
wanted to put a second NIc in there to interface with the school.  I put 
in another 8-bit 3c503 that has a RJ45 jack and now the kernel cannot 
find either card.  If I just put the 3c503 with the RJ45 jack in, the 
kernel doesn't find it either.  So, I put a 3c509 in in place of the 
3c503 with the RJ45 jack, but I still cannot get the 3c503 that used to 
work fine to be detected.  Also, in all the configurations I tried, all 
of the cards passed the diagnostic tests on the 3Com disks.

Computer 2: 
- Pentium 187/75, 32 MB RAM
- Onboard PCI EIDE/LPT/COM
- Maxtor 6.8 Gig UDMA and Seagate 1.7 Gig EIDE drives
- Pioneer 24x ATAPI CD-ROM
- 3Com 3c509 combo NIC
- non-PnP SB16
- AIC 6360 SCSI adapter w/ external Zip drive
- 250 Watt power supply

Problems:
- I recently replaced a 2 Gig hard drive mentioned above with the 6.8 Gig 
drive.  It worked fine for about two or three days.  Then it started 
locking up while copying data from the CD to the 6.8 gig hard drive.  At 
firs, it would only lock up after about ten minutes of straight copying, 
but the problem grew progressively worse and right now it locks up after 
about 2 minutes.  IT does this in both Win95 and FreeBSD.  When it locks, 
it locks up real hard, in 95 I can't do jack squat, and in FreeBSD, the 
only response I got was a series of beeps when I tried to change 
terminals to kill the cp process.  The computer has in the past two or 
three days taken an even weirder twist: it boots up fine, but kdm cores 
out with a signal 11, and so does tcsh, which I happen to use for all my 
login shells.  At the moment I'm leaving the system off to minimize the 
possibility of corrupting my data.  I thought it might be my power 
supply, but I don't see why a 250 watt power supply can't handle that 
type of load.  Could it be my memory?

Thanks for any and all responses.  Also, please cc me in all replies as 
I'm not reading the chat list.

John Baldwin
jbaldwin@richmond.freedomnet.com



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