EISA boards

[Evan Leibovitch]

I must say my first expreience with an EISA system has been a nightmare,
and the perceived improvements certainly don't outweigh the pain.

HARDWARE:
	ALR PowerCache 4e (486)
	600Meg disk,
	24 Meg RAM,
	Corollory 8x4 multiplexed serial board (32 ports),
	Western Digital EtherPlus 16.
	Wangtek 150Meg Tape

SOFTWARE:
	ESIX Rev D

PROBLEM:

The systems (two identical ones) crash sporadically when reading or
writing the tape drives. Sometimes it works fine, sometimes it causes
kernel panics (the lovely kind that try to dump system RAM into swap).
The problem was not repeatable at will, but frequent enough to make the
systems useless for their intended applications.

SOLUTION:

Moving the Wangtek tape controllers from EISA slots to the 16-bit ISA
"compatability" slots resolved that problem. The tapes now work just fine.

SIDE-EFFECT:

Now the system panics sometimes, with the same error messages, when
reading from or writing to ... the floppy!

If indeed the EISA slots are supposed to, by definition, be backwards
compatible with ISA slots, why would moving a board from an EISA slot to
an ISA slot change the machine's behavior?

Or is this a "standard" that each manufacturer implements differently? :-(
-- 
Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
     evan at telly.on.ca / uunet!attcan!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
      Keep an open mind -- you'll never know what might fall in.