Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!wupost!usc!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!ira.uka.de!math.fu-berlin.de!unidui!du9ds3!veit From: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de (Holger Veit) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: HP Vectra and 386BSD, hope it's not a FAQ Date: 15 Sep 92 16:45:29 GMT Organization: Uni-Duisburg FB9 Datenverarbeitung Lines: 45 Message-ID: <veit.716575529@du9ds3> References: <u4901ac.716556561@sun7> Reply-To: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de NNTP-Posting-Host: du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de Keywords: HP Vectra In <u4901ac.716556561@sun7> u4901ac@sun7.LRZ-Muenchen.DE () writes: >Hi, >I tried to boot the tiny boot diskette on a HP Vectra 386/25 with 170 MB disk >space. But the PC always reboots a few seconds after displaying the rom bios >copyright. I've read bsd.faq very carefully and read nearly everything related >in this newsgroup -- nothing seems to help me. I think it a problem of the 4 >extra k that this machine uses for the rom bios. I tried the instructions >recommended in bsd.faq but they are for an american setup program - I have >a german one. >Has anyone an idea to get rid of these 4 k ? >----------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Henning Brockfeld u4901ac@sun7.lrz-muenchen.de >Institute for economic geography >University of Munich >----------------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't think that the 4k BIOS space will influence operation, because from the moment the secondary bootloader is loaded the system is "flying" without any BIOS support. So thether or not the data area is overwritten or reserved for other things, is irrelevant then (unless is it mapped out of the normal world by some chipset on the motherboard - then it is away). I suspect that many problems relate to special, incompatible handling of essential facilities, here in particular the Gate A20 code. There are a couple of different ways to enable this address bit, the keyboard controller method used by IBM (and "compatibles") is just one. When I disassembled some version of HIMEM.SYS long ago (just to find out what is does, no documentation on XMS was available that time), I was really shocked to find undocumented instructions (LOADALL'286) and about a dozen of different methods to detect special hardware and then switch this simple A20 bit on and off. I think, some sort of Compaq and the HP Vectra was among those incompatible systems, but I am not quite sure. Holger -- | | / Dr. Holger Veit | INTERNET: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de |__| / University of Duisburg | BITNET: veit%du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de@UNIDO | | / Dept. of Electr. Eng. | "No, my programs are not BUGGY, these are | |/ Inst. f. Dataprocessing | just unexpected FEATURES"