Microport Unix SVR3.2 boot problem

[pgd at bbt.se]

In article <244 at einstein.eds.com> cirian at einstein.eds.com (Steve Cirian) writes:
>
>Dear Netters,
>
>I recently purchased Microport's Unix System V Release 3.2.2., and tried to
>install it last night, but ran into a major snag.  At one point, the
>directions said to reboot the machine by pressing <ctl><alt><del>, which I did,
>and then the machine rebooted.  And rebooted.  And rebooted.  You get the
>picture.  I tried booting off of the install floppy again, but it just kept
>rebooting also.  What happens when the machine is powered on is:

>The configuration:       Micronics 386/20 (baby size)

You should know that there is a known bug in the Micronics baby size
motherboard, cache memory, with the Intel cache controller. It acts in
such a way that the warm-boot sometimes (always?) fails. The trick is
to never warm-boot, but to always cold-boot. Once it has come into the
warm-boot-fail-mode, you have to turn off power to get the machine
back to normal again. Sometimes it helps with a short off-on-off, but
sometimes you have to wait a minute, or two, to get it back to normal
again.  Sometimes it even helps by cold-booting a few times.

Your problem sounds similar to what we experience with the same model.
But here you cannot even warm-boot from dos.

Turning off the cache might help. (But how do you turn it on again
under unix?)

If you have the 20-Mhz, baby-size, cache-memory, motherboard, maybe
you can contact Micronics about the problem. I am sure they have made
a lot of them, and have a fix for it. If you learn about the fix, I
would be happy to hear about it.

(We have 5 Micronics motherboards computers, different models, and
except for this problem on one of them, they work very nicely. They
all worked from the box, and has given no problem since. The oldest
has been running a 24-hour a day unix system for over 2 years, without
a single failure.)

P.Garbha  (pgd at compuram.bbt.se)