combo board problems

[Bob Haar CS50]

I am having a problem with a combo board and need to
get some help.

My system is a 7300 UNIX PC with 1 Meg of RAM on the motherboard
running release 3.51 . I bought an EIA/RAM combo board with 
0.5 Meg and 2 serial ports. When I brought up the system
with this board, I began to experience problems. The memory
passes all diagnostics and UNIX runs fine using it. I am 
getting mixed results with the serial ports.

The board came with a floppy containing RS232 expansion port
software (v. 3.0). The auto-install proceedure failed - hangup
up with a message saying "Loading device drivers" for > 30 min.
I loaded the install software manually ( cpio -icBv </dev/rfp021 )
and ran the install using "sh -v" to see what was going on. 
The install script hung up will running cmb.rc, which seems 
to initialize the combo board serial ports.

I booted the diagnostic floppy and the expansion serial ports
failed ALL the tests (N.B. the standard serial port passed all
tests.)

There was a version 3.51 expansion port software disk in the
foundation set. This loaded and installed with no problems. 
I then configured all three serial ports for terminal 
connections (9600 baud, no hardware flow control) and was able
to log in and run on all three using a VT100 compatible terminal
emulation on an IBM-PC clone. Great. But the expansion ports
still fail the diagnostics.

Questions:

1) should I believe the diagnostics?

2) is there a different version of the diagnostics that I should
   try?

3) is the loop-back connecto that I made correct? It works for
   testing the standard serial port. The connections I made are:

	|-- pin 2 (Data transmit)
	|
	|-- pin 3 (Data receive)

	|-- pin 4 (Request to send)
	|
	|-- pin 5 (Clear to send)
	|
	|-- pin 8 (carrier detect)

	
	|-- pin 6  (Data set ready)
	|
	|-- pin 20 (Data terminal ready)
	|
	|-- pin 22 (Ring detect)

Bob Haar
G.M. Research Labs

uunet!edsews!rphroy!rcsuna!rhaar
HAAR at GMR.COM (CSNET)