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

[Hans Vlems]

On 7 jan, 17:49, Jan-Erik Soderholm <jan-erik.soderh... at telia.com>
wrote:
> 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.

What do you see on the console if you type >>>SHOW DEV ?
That ought to show the available disks and controllers.
Perhaps the controller is broken?
Hans