Incompatible Periphs???

[Pete Holsberg]

I have this nice AT&T 6386/33E with lots of RAM and a Consensys caching
ESDI controller and an AT&T StarLAN NAU and an AT&T (really a
WD7000-ASC) SCSI board that controls only a WangDAT.  And they won't all
work together!

My VAR and I had a devil of a time getting the SCSI to behave itself
because it apparently wants to have a bootable device connected to
itself.  It doesn't in my system, so after it boots its own ROM,
announcing itself to the world, it just hangs.  We "solved" this problem
by playing with the address jumpers on the SCSI board.  Originally, the
VAR had been told that AT&T had TWO SCSI boards --a bootable and a
non-bootable --but later AT&T took that back, saying that there's only
one.  So we looked for an address that was legal but that the system
wouldn't find so that the SCSI boot wouldn't run.  And we discovered
that D0000 worked.

During the install of the StarLAN s/w, I came to discover that the NAU
as installed by my VAR also had address D0000 and the install s/w was
unhappy.  It said that address C0000 (how could it be off by 10000?) is
used by driver kd and that I should choose another.  When I shutdown and
pulled the board, I discovered that it was jumpered not to C0000 but to
D0000.  To make a long story short, I decided to move it to B0000 (a DOS
program tells me that high memory is free as follows:
	B000-B7FF
	CA00-EFFF
).  Then, I tried to boot and the SCSI hung.  So I went through each of
the 16 possible SCSI addresses and none of them worked.  Most failed
with a hung SCSI, some conflicted with the video so I shut down fast,
and 2 others gave weird error messages and didn't complete a boot.

So I'm in a quandry.  It seems that the SCSI is the problem, because of
its apparent desire to have a bootable device on it.  So do I trash it
and the WangDAT (sob, sob)?  Should I pull the ROMs (probably the two
chips with paper stickers on them?)?  Or what???

Thanks for listening,
Pete
-- 
Prof. Peter J. Holsberg      Mercer County Community College
Voice: 609-586-4800          Engineering Technology, Computers and Math
UUCP:...!princeton!mccc!pjh  1200 Old Trenton Road, Trenton, NJ 08690
Internet: pjh at mccc.edu	     Trenton Computer Festival -- 4/20-21/91