🚀 go-pugleaf

David Longley <David@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>After  many  weeks  of configuring a  small  network,  everything 
>seemed to be in place until Friday. ** DMA TEST FAIL !! ***
>
>System 486DX-100
>       heatsink+Fan
>
>Motherboard PCI Bus Mainboard (48 and a BIG 6 on the manual)
>
>The IDE is disabled and I'm running two SCSI hard disks of a  BUS 
>LOGIC  BT545S. All was working fine until we tried a new  network 
>adapter  and  at  one stage of configuring  Windows,  the  SYSTEM 
>directory was scrambled and we got gobbledegook on the screen.
>
>Next, when the system. just before the drives are identified,  we 
>got the message  ** DMA TEST FAIL !! ***
>
>Pulling  the network card and trying again, the system seemed  to 
>work fine till now. Now I can;t get rid of the message at all.
>
>I have tried swapping the SCSI card for another, a Future  Domain 
>16 bit card and with that card the system just stops at the  SCSI 
>ROM signature. The BUS LOGIC card works fine on another system.
>
>Question 1 - where is this message coming from?
>
>             a) CPU
>             b) Motherboard
>
>What can I do about it?

It's a motherboard message, most likely.  Make sure the card is firmly 
seated in the VLB slot, and that bus-mastering is enabled for that slot.

Remove the network card until you get the system up and running again, 
and then make sure that the two cards are not trying to use the same 
resources - IRQ, I/O address, etc.

Jo Kellner
BusLogic Technical Support
(408) 654-0760