[Info-vax] Weird problem with non-booting AlphaServer 800.

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Hi.

We have an (old) AS800 that right know refuses to boot.

This server has worked just fine until Saturday when I
(for different reasons) decided to reboot it (remotely).

It never come back up and I also discovered that the
terminalserver setup to the console didn't work (should
have checked that first, of course, but... :-) ) That
was fixed today (Monday) so I do have consoel access now.

The reason for the reboot was that I discovered that this
server was running with shadowing shut off. There are disk
in the box for shadowing but probably this was disabled
at some update a few years ago.

I changed SHADOWING from "0" to "2" and SHADOW_SYS_DISK
from "0" to "1" and initiated a reboot.

This is a "dev" box so there is noone else then me that
is missing the box, fortunately :-)

Everyting looks just fine, but the boot sequence just hangs
after the "jumping to bootstrap code" line. If I boot using
the normal 0,0 flags, it returnes to the >>> prompt silently
after aprox a minute (after the "Jumping to..." message).
No errors or other messages. Everyting using SHOW at the
console looks OK.

If I boot with 0,1 flags (conversational) it just hangs
indefinitely (until power cycled).

The weird thing is that I get the same result if I try
to boot using another disk (former part of the system
shadow set, but has not been used for a couple of years).

We will probably try to get a replacement AS800 on-site as
soon as possible together with a fresh bootable VMS disk.

But I'd though that I'd ask anyway if someone might have seen
this kind of behaviour before? I would think that if something
in VMS itself was "wrong", it (VMS) would tell me so.

And a conversationel boot would at least get me to the
"SYSBOOT>" prompt, not ? What on the system disk would
prevent the SYSBOOT> prompt from beeing displayed?
Well, apart from a missing VMS system on the disk. :-)

Here is what a (conversational) boot attempt looks like :

 >>>boot dka100 -flags 0,1
(boot dka100.1.0.5.0 -flags 0,1)
block 0 of dka100.1.0.5.0 is a valid boot block
reading 1168 blocks from dka100.1.0.5.0
bootstrap code read in
base = 1d6000, image_start = 0, image_bytes = 92000
initializing HWRPB at 2000
initializing page table at 7ffce000
initializing machine state
setting affinity to the primary CPU
jumping to bootstrap code

[hanging indefinitley here...]


Jan-Erik.