Re: Current hangs at boot

[Jochen Kunz <jkunz%unixag-kl.fh-kl.de@localhost>]

On Sat, 17 May 2008 00:04:58 -0700 (MST)
Tim Rightnour <root%garbled.net@localhost> wrote:

> > I upgraded my machine from a 330MHz / 1 MB L2 cache CPU to a 400
> > MHz / 4 MB L2 cache CPU. Now it boots with 2 GB RAM. Odd.
> Aigh.  As far as I know 333/2GB is a supported configuration
> (physically, by IBM that is).  Can you please make a machine with
> that setup remotely accessible to me?  Or maybe try AIX on it just to
> be sure it works there first.
I swaped the machine with one that has 2 GB. But it also has a newer
firmware. It works with 2 GB. I already booted it, there is a dmesg in
the ofppc NFS-root directory...

> My memory card is mostly empty.  I have a single card in mine, and no
> card for the secondary memory slot. 
I had a glance at the service manual. The memory card I have looks like
it could fit into the -270. The card has 10 DIMMs with 128 MB per DIMM.

> As far as the CPU you mentioned,
> I dunno what kind that is.  Right now I have mine set with a
> 4x375-8MB L2 card, so it's unlikely you have a better card.
OK, can't beat that.

> In theory I could use the dimms and the second memory card, but I
> dunno if shipping that would be overly costly to you.
A friend of mine lives in the USA and travels to germany several times
a year. I may be able to arrange shipping via him. (He used to take
VAXen and PDP-11s with him on plane. So a RS/6000 memory card shold be
no problem.) This will also avoid any troble with customs...

> > Hmmmm. Maybe it needs to be kreidlered...
> I have no idea what that word means, but glad you got it working. :)
German geek speak. Kreidler is an old german motorcycle brand. Kreidlers
tended to stop working for no real reason. You disassembled it to
repair it, only to find no obvious defect. So you reassembled
everything just like it was before and the Kreidler did run again.
Therefore we call the repair method "disassemble - reassemble" to
kreidler. ;-)

At least for electronic components this has a real effect. Reseating a
connector can solve problems with flaky contacts and readjusts the
connector alignment.

> Right.. to boot disk you need to pick the right partition.  OFW
> numbers them from 1.  So to boot an RS/6000 you need to type boot
> disk:3 or boot disk:4.
Ahhh, OK. "boot disk:3" did the trick. Thanks for the hint.

> > I instaled using sysinst on the -150 and I can't boot the machine at
> > all from disk. It tells me "No Operating System Instaled". I can
> > "boot -a net" from OFW and then I can change the root device to
> > sd0. This is the MBR partition table. It looks almost identical to
> > the one from the -170:
> Very odd.  That should work, It's supposed to cope with the multiboot
> stuff just fine.  Maybe something is odd about the multiboot support
> on your machine.
Maybe EFIRMWARETOOLD. I'll see. I'll mount a disk in the B50 at the
colocation as it has a newer firmware.

> Perhaps you could help me debug the multiboot support a bit.  Maybe
> try disabling partitions 0 and 1, or changing the numbers on them, or
> whatever, to try and get the machine to recognize the bootable
> partition.  It would be nice to know what your machines expect to see.
> 
> It's also possible it doesn't like something about the format of the
> chrp bootinfo.txt file.
I'll tinker around with it and keep you informed what I get.
-- 


tsch__,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/