vax go bye-bye

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Wed Jan 24 20:55:53 2001

Sigh, just thought I would relate a tail of woe, not sure what happened but
if someone has something to try I'm open to it.

I've got a DEC VAX 4000/60 that I've been running VMS on lately. I shut it
down and took it apart to take pictures of it for the "House of VAX" pages.
I carefully re-assembled it and when I turned it on again it wasn't working.

The failure mode was "all lights on" which on the VAX generally means that
it didn't get through the basic system integrity tests. Yikes! I turned if
off, carefully re-checked my assembly and verified everything was correct.
Tried re-seating a few of the connected bits (lights & switches, frame
buffer, etc) and nada, zip, same dead machine.

One person suggested that the PSU might be misaligned, I verified that this
was not the case. I verified that the PSU voltages are all correct, and
replaced the PSU to be sure that I had a good power supply. Then I tested
the old one and it works fine (well I can draw a couple of amps out of all
the voltages and they stay solid).

Then I took the memory and verified in another vax that it was still ok. It
was.

Then verified the frame buffer and scsi drives.

Everything still works, just the mainboard refuses to do anything. Does
anyone have the pinout on the VAX chips on the board? I could check for
clock I suppose and see if the oscillator can took a dump, but beyond that
I'm stuck. Since nothing else seemed to die I can't imagine what fault
would cause these symptoms. I even reset the NVRAM in an effort to verify
that it hadn't been corrupted somehow.

Very strange, any clues or other avenues to explore would be appreciated.
--Chuck
Received on Wed Jan 24 2001 - 20:55:53 GMT