On Mon, 20 Jan 1997, Mark Brinicombe wrote:

> On Sun, 19 Jan 1997, Ben Strawson wrote:
> 
> > 
> > I've tried kernel 4922 on my machine (SA110, RiscBSD on 420Mb IDE, Cumana
> > SCSI (not used for RiscBSD), 24Mb RAM etc.)
> > 
> > The floppy drive does not work still (I had the same problems as everyone
> > else reported).
> 
> Ok I need some clarification here. I know of two problems that have been
> reported.
> 
> 1. The floppy is not detected at probe time
> 2. The floppy reports lots of errors / disk corruption

With mine, the floppy is detected, but when trying to use it with msdos
discs I get a lot of I/O errors (other formats of disc probably give the
same errors, though I've only tried msdos).  It even managed to mess up
one of my discs, so the filesnames are mangled completely, and the file
sizes are impossible big! (.5Gb on a floppy?  I wish!).

I bought my machine as an ARM600 around April '95 I think it was.

> Neither of these problems effect my machine ;-)

This does not surprise me - bugs never affect those who know how to fix
them :-)

> The floppy not being detected is an odd one. Neil (think it was him) had
> this problem for a while when he replaces his floppy drive. When he
> swapped the floppy drive again the problem disappears which made it look
> like it was related to particular floppy drives.

Could be they changed drive manufacturer at some time...Or it could be
related to the motherboard - Neil's been a 700 and mine a 600...

> Any more info etc would be helpful.

Feel free to ask - I can give you log output if required, though it's not
stunning reading.  Just lots of hard errors I think (have to go home to
check this).

> > Out of interest, the kernel is detecting my SCSI card and drive on startup
> > (reports one drive on csc0 as I would expect).  However, I am currently
> > using *only* the IDE disc for RiscBSD, so not sure how much further it
> > would get if I was running RiscBSD off the SCSI drive.
> 
> Well technically if RiscBSD were installed on the SCSI disk you could boot
> straight from it.
> Now that the interrupt problems with the cumana and powertec drivers are
> fixed I expect xfer rates to be improving soon make the drivers a
> reasonable alternative to IDE.

I did have RiscBSD on my SCSI disc, but when it gave problems and I had to
reinstall everything, I decided I might as well take the opportunity to
swap to IDE.  Now that SCSI is getting better, I shall probably swap back
again.

Ben.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ben Strawson                                            b.strawson@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Department of Computer Science
University College London           http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/students/b.strawson
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------