> > The bad news is, it didn't work: even after waiting a full minute, I
> > got nothing out the console serial port.  (It normally starts printing
> > stuff about 45 seconds after power-up.  I don't have the diagnostic
> > LEDs hooked up.)
> 
> Yikes! 45 seconds?
> 
> My board might not be broken after all. I never waited 45 seconds for
> output on the serial lines. Is this documented anywhere?

I have been installing on a 3000 M300LX box (MooU Surplus junk), and
on the serial port it takes about that long to come up.  With two
heads, it displays the initialization and waits for what seems at
least 10-15 seconds for the scsi initialization, then starts the
boot process and swaps over to the terminal.  That whole process
seems to take around 45 seconds on my box, too.

> So, what's the serial pinout gotcha? Is it documented?
> 
> And when testing random motherboards, how long do you guys leave the 
> board hooked up and running before declaring that nothing will happen?
> More than 45 seconds?

I had two machines from MooU surplus.  One had a really flaky board that
would stick at one point in the initialization process, where it tries
to read the ethernet port.  It would then go into a loop and halt after
a few program counter dumps to the screen.  On a serial terminal, also
hooked up to it, nothing came out.  It just seemed frozen.  It could
be you are running into that sort of thing.  I sense someone may have
hooked up the wrong thing into my ethernet port by misteak and fried
it.

My other board worked fine, and would get into the booting on the
serial port after about 45 seconds.

Good LUck

Bob

How the dickens does one get X up on a Turbochannel alpha 3000 M300LX?
As ol' Number 5 was want to say, ``Need input.... need input....''.