Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Just dug my RISCiX boxes out for an airing. Acorn R140 (4MB RAM, upgraded to ARM3 and SCSI in place of ARM2 and ST506) and A540 (16MB RAM, ARM3+FPA). Not great for Unix as the page size is 32KB so you don't get many pages in 4MB!

The R140 refuses to start at all; the A540 started OK in single-user mode, but on trying to go multi-user, it did a disk check, rebooted itself and was reporting errors relating to a "QMAGIC table". Not sure whether it's a disk check issue or something entirely different. Google finds nothing under "unix qmagic" so I wondered if anyone here had any ideas what it refers to.

Have had to reset the machine; it's now in single user mode running fsck!

TIA,
Andrew

A google search for <<"qmagic" acorn>> leads to several hits regarding the format of the executables - maybe this is of any help for you?

Regards

HDC

Yes, thank you. I had searched for "qmagic" and "qmagic unix" - talk about overlooking the obvious!

I was able to reboot successfully, but then noticed that the multiuser login text mentioned 1.15 whereas the kernel is 1.21c - I think the disk in question has become an awkward mix of the two versions (1.15 for the R140 before its ARM3 upgrade). Fortunately I have another disk with a cleaner 1.21c installation, and a dump of an R260 to fall back on as well. After stripping down to the motherboard, removing and _firmly_ reinstalling the ARM3/MEMC1A/RAM daughtercard (designed for an A310 to overcome its 1MB limit, but used here to replace the m/b RAM which has a problem - the ARM3 was a bonus!), the R140 booted as well - which is how I know about the relatively clean 1.21c disk! But that was most of the day gone ... leaving time only to discover that RISCiX and a ColourCard don't mix, even though the CC passes through standard Acorn screen modes.