11/44 scare

From: John Lawson <jpl15_at_panix.com>
Date: Sat Nov 9 03:37:01 2002

  Well, this evening I fired up the PDP11/44 machine that I drug to VCF5
and back... it has moved into the house to live in what would have been
the dining room, had I not made my office there. I thought of leaving it
in the garage and just having the teminals in here, but it's getting
regularly down into the teens and below at night, and Winter is hardly
here yet...

  Anyway, after checking things out visually, I powered it on and the
monitor immediately trapped to the console and halted.

 Ah. Schiess/Merde/Caca!

  Okay, no problem, something shook loose during all the moving and
loading/unloading.. I powered down and re-seated the cards. Power back
up, same thing. Starts to boot, traps to ODT, proc halts displaying the
address it's stumbling over.

  I paused to give vent to language that is best represented by ASCII line
noise.

  BUT: I have doc! I have Processor Manuals! I have the Technical Manual!
And, using ODT, I found that the system was trying to boot the ESDI drives
and failing. I'm so proud of myself - decoded the error codes, followed
the registers to what was hurting... the Dilog 626 has died... tried to
boot from the RL02 - that works fine.

  Got the other 626 from the other (dead) /44 chassis - now all is well.

  SO - I'm looking for another Unibus ESDI controller.... as well as all
the other Junque. I'm supposed to have a SCSI card on the way - if it
works it will have been a Good Deal. If it's trash - oh, well: keep
looking.


  And there you have it.


Cheers

John
Received on Sat Nov 09 2002 - 03:37:01 GMT