NS 3.3 on white, help!
Paolo Zuliani
after an effortless installation of NS3.3 on
my turbocolor I decided to try it out on my PIII.
Well, there seems to be no way to make NS recognize
my Atapi CD. I swapped the order of the drivers: first
the EIDE then the Adaptec1542B. My ATA hardrive is correctly
detected (manufactures, model) but the CD is not.
Using the boot order suggested by NeXT (1542B then EIDE)
I can get the ATA disk and the ATAPI device detected, but
then NS gets some errors when it tries to reset the device.
I think it tries to reset the hd, while it is in fact the
CDrom. This is just my guess!
My pc is PIII 500, mobo BX, 128MB ram, no SCSI!
Any help will be very appreciated!
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Paolo
PS
I tried to disable the CD from the BIOS, but alas, no way.
James MacDonald
Paolo Zuliani <scro...@sable.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> Well, there seems to be no way to make NS recognize
> my Atapi CD. I swapped the order of the drivers: first
> the EIDE then the Adaptec1542B.
The 1542B driver is just a placeholder so that the SCSI emulation layer can
be initialised. Remember, ATAPI is essentially a way of sending SCSI commands
over the ATA bus.
> My ATA hardrive is correctly detected (manufactures, model) but the CD is
> not.
Disconnect your hard drive and configure your CD-ROM as master; plug it into
the IDE connector that previously interfaced with your hard drive.
If the drive is recognised (you'll at least be able to load NeXT's fdisk)
then set your drive as slave and plug your hard drive back in. You will need
a cable with a connector in the middle if you don't already have one.
> Using the boot order suggested by NeXT (1542B then EIDE) I can get the ATA
> disk and the ATAPI device detected, but then NS gets some errors when it
> tries to reset the device. I think it tries to reset the hd, while it is in
> fact the CDrom. This is just my guess!
You could substantiate that guess by providing the messages from the kernel
as it boots up.
One thing I would try is to get the OPENSTEP 4.2 boot floppies; the EIDE
driver in these is much better than that as shipped with NS 3.3 and it
detects drives connected to the secondary interface where NS 3.3's EIDE
driver does not.
Even if you don't want to install OPENSTEP, they are a useful diagnostic.
If they work, try using your black hardware to untar EIDE v3.37 and use that.
> My pc is PIII 500, mobo BX, 128MB ram, no SCSI!
> PS
> I tried to disable the CD from the BIOS, but alas, no way.
This is certainly possible with the Award BIOS v6.00 as shipped with at
least one particular BX board. In fact, it's the default :-) :-)
--
James MacDonald; Acorn/NeXT/Rush (TLKiaWoL!)
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Paolo Zuliani
: One thing I would try is to get the OPENSTEP 4.2 boot floppies; the EIDE
: driver in these is much better than that as shipped with NS 3.3 and it
: detects drives connected to the secondary interface where NS 3.3's EIDE
: driver does not.
That was a good suggestion. Now the installation program sees the Atapi CD
and the 6.4GB ATA disk. It can mount the root device from the NS3.3 cd (it
does not complain because it's not OS4.2), however it cannot find any startup
disk for installing NS (it needs a 512byte/sector disk).
The geometry of my disk is chs=13410,15,63. Could it be the cause of the
problem?
Regards,
Paolo