Different boot problem...

[Brian D. Botton]

In article <12744 at helios.TAMU.EDU> n138ct at tamuts.tamu.edu (Brent Burton) writes:

  Lots of stuff skipped over.

>What do the marching boxes mean ...

  The story of the marching boxes is this:  After the boot ROM initializes
the hardware it jumps to an infinate loop and draws the first square.  It
then tries to boot from the floppy.  If it cannot, it tries to boot from the
hard disk.  If it cannot, it goes back to trying the floppy.  Each time it
starts the loop over it draws a new square.
  The floppy's LED stays on  because it gets "select"ed at the beginning of
the infinate loop and thus says on.  When the loader is finally loaded into
RAM, both the floppy and hard disk are "deselect"ed.

  BTW, if you look in /usr/include/sys/machine.m you will see that there are
3 disk types, winchester (HD), floppy (FD) and syquest (SY).  It is fairly
obvious from the boot ROM and loader code that support for more than the
HD and FD was intended and easy to add.  Does anyone know what a "syquest" is?

>				 and why doesn't it see the hard drive to start
>loading?  I have two sets of disk cables and both sets result in intermittant
>boots.

  The hard disk must go into a ready state before it can be accessed.  Is
the circuit card on the hard disk shorting to the cabinet when all the screws
are tight?  Look for cables that are being stretched or something shorting
the hard disk.
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