unable to install SCO Xenix on 386 (a followup)

[Nick Pemberton]

As a followup to my original posting about not being able to install
SCO Xenix:

I had several people write to me about the problem, with a number of
suggestions, summarized below. My thanks to all who wrote. 

One fellow suggested I try booting off the N1 floppy and at the
boot prompt type: xenix rootdev=hd(40,0)

This worked, except that the kernal then could only execute 12 processes. Not
too great for multiuser mode.

Another suggested I limit myself to 1024 cylinders, as suggested in the sco
docs. This also worked, but for a short period of time: It got through the
first boot, but not the second.

Yet another suggested a DOS partition on the drive. This was fine for DOS
but not for XENIX - Xenix still wouldn't boot.

SCO got me to use a format program called SPEEDSTOR, which again worked for
a bit, but not consistently.

What seems to happen is the disk is not stable, in that tracks that appear fine
at startup in fact are borderline, so after some use they become unreadable.
This is particularly bad after power downs: the system has never yet been
able to boot up after a power down.

But, there may be hope:

PRIAM, the folks who make the drive, phoned back my supplier who relayed
the following: The Priam BIOS must be in, and XENIX must be told it has
a disk with half the number of cylinders and twice as many heads. The
hardware will apparently try and translate this automatically. I am told
by PRIAM that they have the *exact* same set up as me running perfectly.

I'll get back to y'all with the results....

Nick.
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Nick Pemberton                   UUCP: !{utzoo,utai}!lsuc!aimed!nick
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