Re: HEELLPPP!!

[dminer@nyx.net (Dan Miner)]

According to James A. Robinson:
> 
> It has 2 1-gig IDE hardrives on it, and I are using a DTC 2277VL Vesa
> Local Bus to IDE cacheing controller.  The controller has 4 1x9 meg
> simms on it (which I are pretty sure are good since I pulled them out
> of a working machine).  The machine boots up just fine, and I can
> partition the drives without any problem.  But whenever I run mke2fs
> on any of the partitions, I get a seg fault!
> 
> Does anybody have any idea what could cause this problem?  I won't
> rule out the motherboard or drives being flaky, since the scum who
> sold us several machines turned out to be a real sleaze -- but is
> there any way I can pinpoint the problem?

At work, I get this one from time to time.  It *appears* to be
the IDE controller and a flaky caching chipset.  In this case,
I won't rule out a memory caching problem on the motherboard either
(usually shows up on machine with >16megs RAM).  My suggestion
would be to get a nice and *plain* $50 IDE controller (ISA or VL) and
try it.  If you get seg. faults still, then I'd be taking
a closer look at the motherbaord.

	Regards,
		Dan

BTW, an ISA IDE is probably the better way to go because
the DMA buffer will *have* to be below the 16 meg boundary.
Then try a VL version since I don't believe it has this
limitation in DMA.  (If you're card(s) use it at all :)
Another thought, *disable* the caching on the IDE controller.
You could cancel out the DMA since I doubt the card will
use DMA in that state.  Anyway, I'd be interested in your
experiences.


-- 
Dan Miner					dminer@nyx.cs.du.edu
	"The longer I stare at this screen; the blanker it gets."
						Linux: try it, you'll like.
"Your program is encoded in pi."		I started with a 64