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Like any IBM-compatible computer the PC card may fail to
run some DOS applications perfectly. Utility programs which drive PC hardware
directly and games are the most notorious culprits. While we have made
every effort to support such software it is impossible to guarantee that
every program in the world will work.
If you do have a problem with software, first read the 'Limitations' section on the Readme file supplied with your software to check that what you are trying to do is possible. |
Often if you have a problem you can use the PC card’s trace
information to work out exactly why it won’t go (eg Direct SCSI support,
'PC Card did not reset' error.)
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PC Card did not reset
PC Card not found Sometimes you just get a completely blank screen on starting !PC. The first message means exactly what it says. It can be caused by a number of things.
Again this means exactly what it says. The PC card and the host communicate regularly. If the host gets no response when it expects one it waits about four seconds and then issues this messge. This is the equivalent of a ‘hang’ on a normal PC. It is usually due to a software incompatibilty on the PC card. In most cases a normal PC would also have crashed at this point. HIMEM gives 'cannot control A20Gate' error This will happen if you have the L1 cache option set incorrectly on a Mark I card. It should be 2. See Appendix A for details, and change the setting to be correct. No boot drives available DOS needs to boot from disk. For this it needs two hidden files in specific places on the drive. If these are not present you will get this error message. You will also get this if the DOS partition is not marked 'active'. Normally this happens because you have created a drive and then run !PC without installing DOS onto that drive. It can also happen if !PC has not recognised your hard drive (which may be bootable), so it is actually looking at the floppy drive and being unable to boot from that (because there is no disc in it). Cannot install DOS to hard drive You have created a drive_c partition, but when you try to install DOS is says there is no hard drive, or only gives you the option of installing to a floppy disc. This can happen for a number of reasons to do with the way !PCconfig operates. It is possible for !PCConfig to have edited the wrong config file, or for you to have forgotten to save the settings, or (if you dragged a drive name into the box and made no other changes) for the drive name not to have been recorded. To check that !PC is really looking for the DOS partition name you expect, look at the Config file inside !PC. At the bottom of the file should be a line (or two) like:
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There are innumerable ways of ‘breaking your Windows’,
but a couple are specific to the PC Card:
Wrong version of ARMDRV If you have upgraded your !PC, but not your ARMDRV in the WINDOWS/SYSTEM directory then a message like:
Failure to perform a Custom Install If you did an ‘express’ install, or selected VGA display drivers then you will get a set of drivers that won’t work. Install Windows again, following the instructions in Installing the Aleph One Windows driver on page 39. |
CD-ROM drive is not recognised
This is usually due to some combination of
Means some of the text following DEVICE=A1CD.SYS is incorrect. Currently you may only have the phrase /D:name after this. name is the name by which MSCDEX will know the device driver; it should be no more than 8 characters long. If you do not have /D:name the name will default to MSCD000. ERROR! Cannot find Aleph One BIOS services You are trying to run A1CD.SYS on a system which is not an Aleph One PC card, for example a normal DOS system or the Acorn PC emulator. ERROR! No CD-ROM drives working The !PC application has been unable to find any working CD-ROM drives. This may be because the drive is switched off, or the Acorn CD filing system and driver (CDFS) is not loaded, or you have not configured at least one CD-ROM drive as noted above. If you turn trace messages on then a reason for the failure should be
produced (see Using trace information on page 67).
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First try turning on the trace messages (see start of this
chapter). You should get a reason for the non-appearance of the drive in
the Tracefile.
Here is what the messages mean: SCSI_Reserve failed, device X !PC has been unable to ‘reserve’ the SCSI drive (‘X’ is the device ID), most often because it is in use by something else (usually RISCOS).You need to make the direct access drive the one with the highest SCSI ID (apart from the host) and then
SCSI_Op (Read) failed, device X SCSI_Op (Write) failed, device X !PC has been unable to read or write to the drive using the SCSI_Op SWI. It will always use standard 10-byte SCSI Read or Write commands; you should check that the drive supports these. SCSI_Initialise 2 failed on device X The device did not respond to the SCSI_Initialise SWI. This >uses the SCSI Inquire command to read parameters about the drive. It usually indicates a basic problem with connections to the drive. Warning: SCSI device X is type %d (not direct-access) !PC checks the device type found using the Inquire command. If this is not type 0 (direct-access, usual for hard disks), it gives this warning but continues to attempt to use it. Using non-direct-access devices is not tested and not guaranteed to work. SCSI device X has bad sector size NNN For use with MS-DOS, SCSI disks should be formatted to a sector size of 512 bytes. Unfortunately, RISCOS uses 1024 byte sectors). The drive needs a low-level format to change this – this will need to be done on a PC or using special software under RISCOS. |
Aleph One Ltd. | 67-72 |
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