two steps forward one step back

[Charles Hallenbeck]

Hi Tony -
I just spent some time with a sighted friend slogging through the setup
program menus and have made some progress here. First of all the boot
sequence needed to be fixed. Now I can boot from a floppy okay.

Second, when DOS failed, the error message was from the memory manager
about a faulty device driver. Since I could now run DOS from a floppy I
simply remarked out the line that loaded my scanner interface card and
deleted the "exclude" phrase on the memory manager line. Now I can boot
into DOS on the HD just fine too.

I took the "auto" off the IRQ referring to my external modem serial port
and selected the "EISA/ISA" choice, but the modem already worked okay
anyway with "auto" there. It still works okay.

But I still have a problem sometimes when booting my Linux system. It
always boots up okay from a power off condition. And it also boots up okay
if I do a "shutdown -r" command as root. But it will not load correctly if
I do a "shutdown -h" as root and then hit the reset button (or do
alt-ctrl-del) to try booting back up. And I get the same failure when
running loadlin from DOS. Both these failures are new - they worked fine
before the CPU upgrade, and there have been no software changes or HD
modifications that could account for them.

The failures always occur at the same place - just after the lines that
show several components of PPP being registered, and immediately prior to
a line referencing PCMCIA. At least when it DOES run to completion, the
PCMCIA line follows the PPP lines in the bootup message sequence.

I am convinced there must still be something to change in the setup
program, but I have not the foggiest clue as to what it might be.

When the boot failures occur, there is no speech, no keyboard entries are
possible, and no error messages appear on the screen. The hard reset
button still works, and when it next boots properly there is no forced
disk check resulting from the hanging condition.

But at least my DOS works and I can pay my bills, even if I cannot put
this powerhouse to work on the scanner.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

Chuck


On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, Tony Baechler wrote:

> Hi.  You could try making sure plug and play is off in BIOS.  This might
> read something like "plug and play OS support" or something.  You might
> also make sure that the serial port assignments are not set to
> "auto."  Just manually set them to the correct IRQ and set the BIOS to
> manual so it does not change them.  Good luck.
>
>
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