🚀 go-pugleaf

	Gone are the days when you could rely on SCSI to work properly
(or so it seems).

	I decided to re-install '98 last night since my original
installation was a nightmare (due to BIOS problems which meant my
floppy disk was *very* flaky) and I had installed a BIOS upgrade
recently and figured it was worth trying again.  For one thing I
wanted a single 4.5GB FAT32 partition instead of two 2GBish FAT16
ones.

	The drive I want to use is a Quantum Viking Ultra Wide SCSI
device.  As I said, this *used* to have a more-or-less functional '98
install on it.  I do a low-level format and attempt to install '98 on
it (the upgrade edition off of CD).  First part of the install goes
fine but the system doesn't come up after the first reboot.  Just sits
there are churns the disk.  Amusingly, if you hit the Break key it
stops, but resumes after you hit any other key.  Cool, huh?

	I do this a few more times, and try a couple of NT installs too
figuring that since '98 hooks into the NT loader it might work better.
NT installs fine but the first reboot of the '98 install does the
same thing as it did before. :-(

	So I boot from the '98 floppy and do

format c:
sys c:

	on the presumption that if everything is even a little bit
sane I should have the machine booting from the hard disk and it'll
give me a DOS prompt.  This doesn't work either.

	Since I have another machine next to this one, I disconnect
its drive and but the Viking in it.  Same story -- the disk just
churns.  Try to format, sys.  Same story.  This machine has an Adaptec
2940 controller while the other machine has AHA-7895 on the
motherboard.  So it doesn't seem to be a controller problem.  Almost
everything else about these machines is different: one is a Pentium
Pro, the other a Pentium II, PCI vs. AGP video, SCSI CD-R vs. IDE
DVD-ROM etc.  This is suspiciously looking like some sort of disk
problem, except that NT is apparently immune.  [ BTW, I'd would
actually prefer to run NT on the box in question but Matrox hasn't
released drivers for the Rainbow Runner G-Series card so I either have
to live with '95/'98 for now or go without TV.... ]

	Pulled the SCSI drive out and put an IBM IDE drive in.  Works
like a charm.  Note that the second machine I tried it on is all SCSI
so I don't think it's some sort of IDE/SCSI interaction.

	One more worrying thing is that a Win95 install off floppies
doesn't work with the SCSI disk because the ScanDisk FAT check seems
to hang.

	Does anyone know what's going on here?




--
James Macnicol
jamesm@ee.adfa.oz.au