Tom T. Thai wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 10 Jan 1996, VaX#n8 wrote:
> 
> > I currently have:
> >  486/66 on a HiNT chipset mboard, claims to be VLB/EISA/ISA but doesn't
> >  support level-sensitive interrupts and other EISA stuff so it's not
> >  really worth upgrading.  16MB of RAM, 30-pin sockets.
> > 
> > I will eventually want to upgrade the RAM, which means I'll either have to
> > wait for bounce-buffer support (I use an AHA-1542, ISA DMA card) or get
> > a better drive controller... seems everyone is going PCI these days,
> > so I was looking at a minimal-cost upgrade path to such a beast...
> > 
> > All I've seen so far is the ASUS 486SP-G or whatever.
> 
> I have the ASUS 486SP3G, PCI/SCSI2.  But am not sure if the still make it.

    I just bought one about a month ago.  My dealer told me it's been
discontinued, but it's not tough to find distributors that still have
stock (or at least it was that way when I bought this one).  It is a
very nice motherboard, and seems to be ideal for running some form of
Un*x.

    I just got around to installing NetBSD (1.1) yesterday, and I've ran
into two problems that I hope somebody could help me with.
    First off, I'm having a problem that seems to deal with the IDE/SCSI
combination, or the boot manager I'm using, or something.  I have two
drives on my system, one IDE (258MB) and one SCSI (1060MB).  My plan is
to leave the IDE for DOS/Windows/Warp/whatever, and use all of the SCSI
drive for NetBSD.  I have the OS/2 Boot Manager installed on the IDE
drive (the SP3G's BIOS forces boot of IDE if both IDE and SCSI drives
are present).  If I set the SP3G's BIOS to disable the onboard IDE, the
NetBSD boot loader loads sd(0,a)/netbsd, and everything's happy.  If I
enable the IDE interface and select the NetBSD partition from the OS/2
BM, it loads sd(1,a)/netbsd, which loads the kernel but panics when it
tries to mount root.  If I try manually telling the boot loader to load
sd(0,a)/netbsd, it tells me:
Bad disklabelCan't find sd(0,a)/netbsd
    Any suggestions?  I'd really like to not have to disable the IDE
drive before booting NetBSD.  I had the same problems under FreeBSD (my
dealer installed FreeBSD rather than NetBSD on the machine).

    Second, would anyone happen to know about a network card
disappearing while trying to install NetBSD?  I'm pretty sure my card
just kicked the bucket, but it happened while installing NetBSD, so I'm
hoping maybe something just got configured wrong.  I have a Western
Digital WD8013W C (EtherCard PLUS Elite 16T), that was configured
(checked with ezsetup) to ROM disabled, base address 300, IRQ 10, mem
0xCC000 (it's hard jumpered to 300/10/CC000).  It was working fine under
FreeBSD and DOS.  After downloading the boot disks for NetBSD, I
rebooted on the kcoth11 disk.  The NetBSD kernel reported something
about expecting to find ed2 at IRQ 10, while the board reported at IRQ 9
(which is the NCR's IRQ).  Upon the next boot, the kernel didn't say
anything about ed2.  When I went back to DOS, ezsetup now tells me I
don't have a network card!
    Was the board just on it's way out, or did something get set wrong? 
I'd appreciate any suggestions.  The machine wasn't even powercycled
between when it was working and when it failed.  It was working,
rebooted, IRQ was mismatched, rebooted, dead.  Anybody seen anything
like this??

    Thanks in advance!!

                                                          Will Ferry

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