on 8/18/01 7:43 AM, Andreas Priebe at Andreas.Priebe@promos-consult.de
wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have a DecStation 5000/200 running 1.4Q.
> This machine crashed. OK - no big deal I thought ...
> But then it started:
> 
> I have a serial console only. This worked fine all the time.
> But now I have only the output from the boot process until it
> says abount a filesystem, which I should check manually ant it asks
> me to press ENTER or to enter the name of a shell.
> At this point I noticed that the serial console would not take my
> input - it simply ignores it. So I cannot do anything, not even
> interrupt the boot early with a CTRL-C.

    Does sending a break drop it back to the PROM?

> First question:
> Anybody seen this? Do I have any chance to make some input?
> I have removed the graphics card already - no difference.
> I have a DEC keyboard and treid this - no diffrence.

    There are two things I know of that can cause this. One is not having a
mouse(I think(?)) connected on a 5000/200, the machine just freezes during
bootup. The other is not having the terminal set up to do "modem control" or
DTR handshaking enabled on the terminal (It should probably have XON/XOFF
flow control on too). In this case the computer would just not listen to
anything your terminal is saying until DTR goes high. You are on Port 3
right?

> At this point I decided to trie to read the SCSI disk on another machine.
> But the only one I have is a Linux PC running a 2.2 kernel.
> It recognizes the disk on startup, but says:

    Chances are the kernel only knows about ext2fs and you will need to use
a more specific mount command. Probably mount_ufs or mount_ffs if they
exist. I've never tried it before so I couldn't tell you.
 
> So this got us to the second question:
> Do I have any chance to recover my data mounting the disk on Linux?

    If you have another spare HD you could write one of the newer disk boot
images to it on the Linux machine with dd and then boot it on the DECstation
from the second HD and mount the original HD's file system and/or update to
a newer version. Assuming that it doesn't freeze for the same reason; I
could have sworn that the 5000/200 was fixed up a while ago if it's the
freeze that I'm thinking of.


    Chris