My original question (included below) was about how to get an
AlphaStation 500/500 to regognize its sound board (the standard MSB).
The answer to this question was to invoke the EISA configuration
utility in SRM and add the sound option. After doing so the sound
board showed up alright.
It seems that Digital deserves some bashing for the lousy manual. I
_know_ that the AS500 is an EISA machine. The presence of EISA doesn't
necessarily mean that there is no ISA bus. The sound board section of
the manual did not say anything about using ECU to configure the sound
board but i did mention isacfg. Cut'n'paste is a dangerous thing.
Thank you all for the kind replies.
/Erik
Original question and answers:
I have difficulties getting an AlphaStation 500/500 to recognize its
sound board. The machine is like all my other Alphas running Digital
Unix 4.0B and this is the first time I have failed to get the sound
working. It seems as if the msb device is not configured into
hardware. This has happened before on AS200, but at these times I have
always been able to solve the problem by using the 'isacfg' or the
'add_sound' SRM utilities.
According to the sound board section of the "Digital AlphaStation(tm)
500 Series User Information" (PN EK-ALPH5-UI, Rev B.01) Section G,
"Sound Card Overview", Page G5, 'isacfg' might be of help on the AS500
as well and there is also a pointer that says that more info on isacfg
may be found in the 'ISACFG Secttion' in Appendix A. Now I am stuck
with to problems - both pretty confusing:
1. SRM says "Invalid command" upon entering 'isacfg' or 'add_sound'.
a listing of available console commands shows no trace of any such
commands.
2. There is no ISACFG section in Appendix A in the above mentioned
manual.
Facts about the system:
AlphaStation 500/500, 2 GB disk, 288 MB RAM, PowerStorm 4D40,
Fast Ethernet (present as one PCI card - DE500 I think), console
firmware V6.4-5.
-----
From: John Kohl <jtk_at_atria.com>
You probably need to boot up an ECU diskette and have it configure the
sound hardware. That's what I had to do on my AS 500/400, which came
with Windows NT and got reinstalled with new firmware and OS.
==John
----
From: Per Boussard T/ED <Per.Boussard_at_era-t.ericsson.se>
I had the very same problem with the very same type of
machine. Lyckily I had a DEC consultant there at the moment. The card
is on an eisa-bus, and you need to run an eisa-config utility, which,
I understood, due to some copyright restrictions has to be delivered
on a separate floppy instead of being baked into the console
software. That sucks. Running that will do the PCish eisa-config
thing, and then it all works.
/Per
-----
From: "Dr. Tom Blinn, 603-881-0646" <tpb_at_zk3.dec.com>
I'm pretty sure that system has an EISA bus, not an ISA bus, so you
would need to run the EISA Configuration Utility (ECU), which I
believe has the ability to add the MSB support. I believe you need to
switch to the NT console, run the ECU, then switch back to the SRM
console and reboot to have the system see the sound board. Once
you've added it with the ECU, then the console may report it in a show
config command.
The isacfg utility only works on systems with an ISA bus, not on
systems with an EISA bus. Your hardware documentation should make it
clear which of the two busses is present in the system.
Tom
----------------------------------------------------
Erik Persson Home: +46 13 12 38 89
Banergatan 9 Work: +46 13 28 24 64
582 32 Linkoping, Sweden e-mail: erik_at_lysator.liu.se
Received on Sat May 03 1997 - 19:03:08 NZST