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From: John John at TWS corporate comms <twsmfctee@peg.apc.org>
Subject: Re: Can't boot on 386's
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Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996 00:36 AEST
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Last Week I wrote..
>I recently acquired a pile of old 386 motherboards, modems, and 3com
>ethernet cards. I have this crazy dream of building it all into some sort
>of
>crazy lowtech network based on UNIX if possible (no comments please - its
>just an experiment). The basic problem is that I'm not even getting past
>first base. I have downloaded BOOT.FLP, and used rawrite to make a boot
>disk. This disk has worked on every 386 machine I've tried with the
>exception of these motherboards.
>
>So what have I got?
>
>A variety of boards ranging from 386sx 16 to 386dx40 with 4M to 8M ram. All
>cards have an AMD bios (which I think could be the problem). These cards
>appear to assign ram between 640k and 1M to something called "adaptive"
>memory. I have tried changing all sorts CMOS parameters and played with
>various disk drive controllers and video cards with no success.
>
>What happens?
>
>PC happily reads boot floppy and decompresses the Kernel. When Kernel
>begins
>to boot, the system reboots and starts the whole process again. The -c
>option causes the computer to hang.

Thanks to everyone who replied. Still haven't had a successful boot yet. My
current setup has 8M ram and I've turned off everything that looks like
cache, etc... I'm really looking forward to ripping all the jumpers off the
motherboard and putting them back in all sorts of interesting
configurations. That should make my weekend (or maybe I just get a life).

My question is ... Is there any versions of boot.flp that are more system
tolerant? Does anyone have a customise boot that is less system sensitive?
Should I try the latest snapshots? Would it drive me crazy?

Maybe my P.C would work better as a doorstop than a unix box.

John John