Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!tektronix!tekcrl!tekgvs!keithe
From: keithe@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Keith Ericson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: 386^MAX (and others) experiences (was Re: 386^max questions)
Message-ID: <4836@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM>
Date: 26 Mar 89 21:52:33 GMT
References: <200020@hpmcaa.HP.COM> <4369@tekigm2.MEN.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: keithe@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Keith Ericson)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
Lines: 37

In article alanr@tekigm2.MEN.TEK.COM (Alan Rovner) writes:
>
>I've been using 386 to the Max and 386load for a couple months now and
>would recommend them to any 386 users.  So far I have my mouse driver,
>Ramdisk driver, disk cache programsand other goodies out of base memory
>giving me almost 600K of free base memory.  Everything seems to work fine
>and I enjoy the extra space.

I have a SCSI drive and have had less than magnificent luck getting 386^MAX
to cooperate with either a WD7000ASC SCSI controller card or with an Adaptec
AHA-1540 SCSI controller card.  If I boot up from a floppy that contains the
config.sys (and the drivers it loads) and an autoexec.bat that subsequently
transfers to the hard disk, I can get 386^MAX to work, mostly.  Occasionally
my machine (an Intel 301-based 386AT) will simply stop, requiring either a
soft or hard reboot.  There are some other complicating factors, including
the desire to have PCTools desktop loaded resident.

All in all I'd like to have a SCSI drive work with 386^MAX because I want to
load the PC-NFS drivers and PCTools desktop into high DOS memory (640k-1M
range) and run the MKS Toolkit init/login system.  In a word: hah!  The most
troublesome of which is the MKS Toolkit initialization scheme, which I'll
have to abandon if I keep up with all this.  And because the PCTools Desktop
"loads big" and then releases (sort of) the memory it wanted both 386^MAX
and MKS Toolkit break when they try to load it resident.

And just for grins, I really want to fold VM/386 into all this; I' _like_
to run the networking in one virtual machine, MKS in another, and maybe
PCTools stuff in another.  But VM/386 uses a special driver to share the
hard disk among the virtual machines which doesn't cooperate with PC-NFS's
remote file system.  Aaaaarrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhh!!!!!!!!

Any of the special add-ins work if they're used singularly; two or more
are problematic; three require some real work; and four means you're
porbably going to have to give up something to get them all to work
together, if they work at all.

kEITHe