Re: GS-RAM-Plus woes

[irsman@subzero.winternet.com (Ian Schmidt)]

In article <4oal4t$9o5@news.ysu.edu>,
Adalbert Goertz <be404@yfn.ysu.edu> wrote:

>The diagnostics show first blocks B and C black and after a while the 
>3rd block turns  xxxx and finally it show No good chips on the board.
>The 2 blocks of chips are in blocks A and B, however.

Sounds like maybe you have the wrong kind of chips in the board and it's
doing nasty things to the address demuxer or something.  The GS-Ram Plus
takes 1 meg x 8 chips, not the 256kx8 type commonly used on regular-slot
memory cards and the Apple-brand 1 meg GS board.

>When I select all chips to be ram disk thru the control panel,
>and when I catalog RAM5 using basic.system, it shows the full 2 megs
>as being avaibable minus 8k. So, that seems to be ok.
>I also can copy files to RAM5.

Neither of these things mean a hill of beans with respect to the proper
functioning of the RAM card.  If you try and read the files back out of
/RAM5, are the unaltered and correct?  I would expect not.

>When I boot GSOS 601, the thermometer stops briefly at about 10% with a beep
>and continues to the full length andjust hangs.
>So, what is going on? 

You have bad memory chips, definitely.  This means that GS/OS crashed while
booting due to bad RAM, but the thermometer kept going since it's interrupt
based.

>The diagnostics always shows block B black (ok).
>VCould something else be wrong except the memopry chips?

Not very likely.  Since block B is always ok, try removing block A 
entirely and moving the chips from block B to block A.  Then see if block A
tests out ok.  If so, try booting GS/OS and see what you get...it should
work, aside from being a little short on RAM.

If this doesn't work, the other possibility is that you are using a ROM 1 
GS-Ram Plus with a ROM 3 machine or vice versa.  AE required you to swap out
some PALs on the board in order for it to be compatible with the other
ROM type.  Someone else here probably has more information on what part
numbers to look for for this type of thing.
--
Ian Schmidt - irsman@winternet.com - http://www.winternet.com/~irsman/
    "Where would I be without IBM?" - P. Robb, Information Society