I'm just about to go mad --- I have no idea what the problem with
my setup is.....
It's a PC164 board at 433MHz, a bog standard 2M S3 VGA card, and
a bog standard NCR53810 SCSI host adaptor. On the SCSI bus, there is
a IBM DORS 2G hardisk.
When I boot up the machine, the ALPHA firmware is happy with the NCR
and can display partitioning correctly.
When I boot the machine without the NCR, I can then load MILO and from
that boot into linux, load a ramdisk, everything fine.
However, when I boot with the NCR and then load MILO, MILO hangs when trying
to initialize the NCR. The last lines it prints are
scsi-ncr53c7,8xx: at PCI bus 0, device 9, function 0
scsi-ncr53c7,8xx: warning: revision 17 is greater than 2
scsi-ncr53c7,8xx: NCR53C810 at memory 0x1000000, io 0xb400, irq 19
after that, a total hang.
The next line should be something like "burst length is 8" or such.
I can get that line (and a few more) by jumpering the NCR to INTD
rather than INTA (but of course MILO then does "start test1", which
fails due to missing IRQ, and it suggests setting the IRQ to INTA again).
The _really_ maddening bit is that sometimes (very very rarely), this
thing actually works, and boots right through that hang. It then works
perfectly, and I even got RedHat installed that way (unfortunately, that
was the last time so far that it booted, so I haven't _run_ it). It seems
booting with the IRQ on INTD rather than INTA increases the chance of
getting through the next time (back at INTA).
The time I actually managed to install was after I had put that NCR
into a Pentium machine with NCR firmware installed, and after that
I could boot about 3 times.
I have tried both MILO images available for the PC164 at ftp.digital.com,
and have also updated the firmware. No difference at all.
Any ideas? My current suspect is that NCR controller, but getting another
one means going to the other end of the city (and Melbourne is BIG) by
public transport, and I have done that twice this week......
Bernie
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