[Info-vax] delay in startup

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <4f6f763f$0$1653$c3e8da3$f017e9df at news.astraweb.com>, JF
Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes: 

> Ok, so the mention of battery was misleading. You're just talking ahout
> the toy clock, not some system that can remain powered on (or memory
> kept alive) via batteries.

Right.

> Of one has a bad TOY battery, then the VMS system may have been asking
> for time before proceeding with the boot. And it may have taken you that
> long to enter the time. (or perhpaps the propt for time times out after
> a couple hours and VMS boots anyways)

No-one entered any time (except for the THIRD system, not mentioned in
the post, which as expected didn't boot because it forgot it was
supposed to boot VMS because the battery was dead, and for the same
reason the time had to be entered); the system booted by itself.
According to the documentation, the value of 65535 µfortnights causes
the prompt to repeat indefinitely:

Parameter Name            Current    Default    Minimum    Maximum Unit  Dynamic
--------------            -------    -------    -------    ------- ----  -------
TIMEPROMPTWAIT              65535         -1          0         -1 uFortnights

       o  If TIMEPROMPTWAIT is a number in the range of 32768 through
          65535, the prompt for the time is issued at intervals starting
          with 2 and doubling until 256 seconds is reached. If no
          response is received, the prompts restart, with the 2-second
          interval. This prompting process repeats indefinitely, until
          you specify a time.

> Is it possible that you have a bad system disk on one node and it took
> that long to perform the equivalent of mount/verify of the system disk ?

Maybe.  Any way to easily test this?