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From: george@wombat.bungi.COM (George Scolaro)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.nsc.32k
Subject: Re: re: Minix hangs at start up
Message-ID: <9102250814.AA08605@wombat.bungi.COM>
Date: 25 Feb 91 15:14:31 GMT
Sender: news@daver.bungi.com
Lines: 23
Approved: news@daver.bungi.com

[In the message entitled "re: Minix hangs at start up" on Feb 25, 12:25, Jordan K. Hubbard writes:]
> 
> 
> Gary's board also hung booting Minix in the same place, but had a good
> ICU (he didn't get his from the original kit run) - something that had
> us really stumped for awhile until we tried pulling out his extra 4MB
> of memory just for a lark. Now all works fine. Still a mystery as to
> why 8MB should cause MINIX to fail, anyone want to expand on this?
> 

My guess is that the memory sizing code in the rom/minix may not quite
handle the case of both banks correctly. With only one bank of dram the code
will detect the lack of ram in the next bank as an address range that when
written to will return incorrect data. With both banks of memory the end of
the 2nd bank will wrap into the beginning of the 1st bank (the pc532 does
not decode all the address lines - too many of 'em!), i.e. the sizing code
would overwrite the 1st bank...  Anyhow, just a thought.

best regards,

-- 
George Scolaro
george@wombat.bungi.com                [37 20 51 N / 122 03 07 W]