pmulry wrote:
> I recently aquired a Data General 4000 series server [...]
It's highly possible that the NVRAM's lithium battery will have
died ("gone flat") by now. This is the case with both the AV410
and AV4300 I have. My AV530s/5500 seem to be okay, but it's just
a matter of time before they face the same problem.
The machines with dead NVRAM will give some cryptic indication
of the problem like printing "IDPROM" and nothing else, and
refuse to initialize/boot on power-up.
'r. bear stricklin' was collecting NVRAM dumps for analysis, so
we can try to load usable data into replacement parts, but I've
no idea where that stands. I haven't bothered getting a part to
see if, like Suns, the machine will function at all with an
uninitialized NVRAM. Anyway if you search the archive for his
name or Aviion I'm sure you'll find the relevant post. Or head
to this URL:
http://www.bears.org/~red/museum/aviion-nvram.html
The 88k Aviions were frequently SMP capable, though unless you've
got rackmount or square/big deskside units they're probably just
2-way. If you think the daughter card on yours is a second CPU
complex, look for a chip marked 88100 or 88110; those are the
CPUs. The 88200's or 88410 are cache/MMU chips.
DG/UX will support SMP out of the box. It's a decent enough SVR4
implementation, with X11 (R?) and some sort of logical volume
system. If you're looking for media I may be able to help out,
contact me directly/off-list (smj0302 _ crash _ com).
Martin Marshall wrote:
> http://www-csc.dg.com/csc
If you dig around under there, there's a wealth of PDF files
about various models. Operations guides, some about installing
options and upgrading, low-level programming for a few models.
There's been sporadic interest in getting *BSD running on the
Aviions, but little activity. OpenBSD runs on several Motorola
88k boards, and I've recently managed to assemble the parts for
a complete system, but that's as far as it's gone. I have no
history porting OSes, and I'm much more focused on trying to
find a job now, so you don't want to hold your breath waiting
for me...
--Steve.
Received on Mon Feb 03 2003 - 14:07:00 GMT