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From: John John at TWS corporate comms <twsmfctee@peg.apc.org>
Subject: Can't boot on 386's
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Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 01:00 AEST
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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.

Does anyone have a pointer to a possible solution? If these cards are unable
to run FreeBSD is there a UNIX that will work? Etc..?

I've searching the FAQ and question's database but can't seem to find an
answer besides the possiblity that the cards just are not compatable,

John John