Hi, I'm a complete newbie to Novell, never touched it in my life! I've just inherited a Netware 3.12 machine and cannot get it to boot. The way I understand it, I may be wrong, I have a DOS partition which boot's up and then in turn boot's a Netware partition. The DOS bit seems to work ok, but I get the error message: "There are no accessible disk drives with Netware Partitions. Check to see that the needed disk drivers have been loaded, and that your disk drives are properly connected and powered on" and on the next line "??? Unknown Command???" I'm assuming that I'll need to find a utility to examine the disk drive, but if anyone can offer any suggestions or point me in the right direction, it would be much appreciated. Thanks, Jon..........

OK, so you inherited it and it won't boot. Does this mean it was sitting idle for some time? If yes then chances are the disks with the NW partition has been removed. Do a FDISK and see the partitions. If the NW partition is present then you will have to: 1. Do the usual check of the data ribbon and power cable. 2. Try to find the correct .dsk driver for your disk controller.

Hi, Thanks for the reply. The Server was functioning but we had to power it off to move it to a different location. There is only one hard drive in the machine and it contains a folder called Server.312 so I'm assuming that's the Netware directory. I know it sounds naive, but can I boot it from a file in the Server.312 directory? Cheers, Jon..........

I know and you know, we are talking Netware stone age here. Just type <SERVER> from within the directory and it should fire up! If it doesn't and I recollect, then alternative was to type: SERVER -NA This would boot up the server without running the AUTOEXEC.NCF or mounting the volumes. Load monitor and see the volumes present. Load them one by one. If MOUNT SYS fails, you have trouble. The steps then would be: Get a copy of the file C:\SERVER.312\STARTUP.NCF - print it out or whatever. Then, at the DOS prompt, in C:\SERVER, enter --> server -ns This will load NetWare, but will not execute any of the commands in STARTUP.NCF. You'll have NetWare running, sitting at a bare console prompt (just a ":"). Enter the commands from STARTUP.NCF, one at a time. If you complete them all without any problems, then try entering --> MOUNT SYS: Let me know what happens. Hope, SERVER -NA works for you!

Hi Magnet, I'm getting somewhere with this. I managed to get my head around what the startup.ncf & autoexec.ncf files do. I think I have a problem with the SCSI driver, I will sit for about 10 mins trying to load the driver and then give me the "No netware partitions...." message. I think the disk itself is fine, I can FDISK and view the parition and all seems fine, so I'm just searching for the drivers. The file it tries to load is an Adaptec AIC-7870, but I cannot get hold of the file from the Adaptec website. Any suggestions where to look? Cheers, Jon........

Okay Magnet, a bit more progress!! I've managed to manually load a new SCSI driver which seems to have gone fine although I cannot get it to boot automatically at boot. I just get a driver NOT loaded message. I've tried the MOUNT SYS: command and the HDD chugged for about 5 mins and popped up with a few messages and then took me back to the ":" prompt, I'm assuming it's worked and Netware is fully loaded up? The purpose of this exercise is to enable a Win98 machine running a Netware Client to connect to the machine. When I attempt to log the client in, I get the message that the server may be down. Do I have to do anything else like load the network card drivers? Cheers, Jon........

You need to load the network card and bind the protocol to the card driver in the autoexec.ncf. Example as: LOAD C:\nw.312\driver PORT=300 NAME=LANA BIND IPX TO LANA NET=222