XENIX 386 ESDI Crash

[Mark Dornfeld]

I think SCO's ESDI version is not quite right yet.  I did my
own installation of an SMS OMTI 8620 Controller on a Compaq
386 with 130 Mb disk and 2Mb RAM.  This included setting the
hardware jumpers on the controller. I am using Compaq's floppy
controller, Consensys Tape Drive (Tandberg Siemens 60Mb), and
Consensys PowerPorts 8 Port Controller.  I am sure that none
of the addon peripherals are the cause of the problem because
the problem showed up at installation.

The system periodically crashes when one of the peripherals is
being heavily used.  When extracting a tar archive from
floppy, the system will report:

memory failure - parity error
omti: controller already in select state

once it reported this:

omti: timed out
omti: unloading all requests
omti: non-omti interrupt (C0)

I got burned for the first time from SCO on this one because I
waited beyond my 30 days to report the error and got no
support.

The problem has only occurred during use of the floppy or tape
drive and it does not occur every time.

Has anyone run into this problem before?  Is there a hardware
conflict? Has SCO blown their ESDI drivers?

One other problem.  Suddenly the system will not offer a
prompt when logging in on the console.  It initiallizes
everything runs the motd and then waits.  A few keystrokes
bring up the prompt, but something is broken.

Mark T. Dornfeld
Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queens Park
Toronto, Ontario, CANADA
M5S 2C6

mark at utgpu!rom      - or -     romwa at utgpu