[ot] anyone experienced with ibm personal power series 830?

From: trashcan man <trash_tmp_at_poczta.onet.pl>
Date: Sat Nov 1 18:19:48 2003

some time ago i found a mainboard from IBM Personal Power Systems
830. it's a PReP (or CHRP, i'm not sure) from about 1995[1].
i don't have a parity SIMMs and a cache module, that this machine
was originally equipped with. yesterday it was working fine.
well, almost - i couldn't figure out how to make it boot netbsd,
it got hang after loading the image, however it could load SMS
and pass all the test without problems. nevermind. one of things
i tried was to update firmware to the latest (v1.10, from
p8x0_110.exe, downloaded from ibm ftp site) version. now, during
boot, when displaying the memory icon it makes a short beep
and hangs, w/o any error icon. can anybody experienced with this
hardware tell me, what should i do now? i guess nobody
at ibm tested it without parity memory and without l2 cache module.
should i get parity simm's, or a good soldering iron and memory
flasher?

silly me. before updating, i got into a firmware command line
and made it load new firmware into memory and jump to it's entry
point. it hanged in the exact same way it does now, except it
showed an 'error 00020000' icon. i thought, 'well, it tries
to reinit some device that does not like it'... and flashed
the verified-not-to-work firmware into rom.


[1]. so, strictly speaking, it's offtopic here. it wasn't too
     popular, however, and this is the most appropriate mailing
     list i found.
Received on Sat Nov 01 2003 - 18:19:48 GMT