Subject: Re: curiosity killed my alpha?
To: Francis. Javier Mesa <javi@cse.ucsc.edu>
From: Sean Davis <dive@endersgame.net>
List: port-alpha
Date: 07/13/2003 22:24:19
On Sun, Jul 13, 2003 at 06:32:30PM -0700, Francis. Javier Mesa wrote:
> > Ok, so I was bored, tinkering around in SRM. I had just halted NetBSD, which
> > is (was?) installed and working perfectly.
> >
> > I typed help, got a list of commands. So, out of curiosity, I typed 'nt'.
> >
> > It said something about ARC and the screen went black and it rebooted. Now
> > the screen never comes on, nor does it boot. I have no idea what 'nt' does,
> > but does anybody on this list have a clue as to how I can get it working
> > again? Its configuration is:
> >
> > AlphaStation 600 5/266
> > 266mhz 21164, 128MB RAM
> > Monitor hooked up to the video card that came with it, keyboard hooked up to
> > the keyboard port. On the scsi bus there is a plextor ultraplex wide scsi
> > cd-rom and a western digital sca hard drive connected to the fast-wide bus
> > via an sca->68pin adapter.
> >
> > Any help is very much appreciated. I had this thing working before I went
> > and got curious. :\
> 
> I believe that you forced ARC to switch to AlphaBios which is what NT
> expects, theoretically you should be seeing the alphabios screen but
> something went wrong I guess.

I think this box only has SRM, no ARC, or something. Because from the user
manual for this model, and everything else i can find, ARC should show me a
menu from which I could easily bring back SRM.

> 
> Have you tried hooking up a serial terminal to the machine, to see if its
> outputing something over the serial console?
> 

I will as soon as I can get my hands on a serial cable. I'll need to borrow
one from a friend (hopefully tomorrow).

> Here are the firmware links for the AS600:
> 
> http://ftp.digital.com/pub/DEC/Alpha/firmware/archive/astn600.html

Been there, but the problem is that they no longer archive the actual
firmware for the alphastation 600. only the 600A, which is different
hardware in the same case, from what i understand. I searched an ftpsearch
for the filename of the firmware, and came up with one result,
on ftp.europe.digital.com, which seems to be down.

-Sean

-- 
/~\ The ASCII
\ / Ribbon Campaign                   Sean Davis
 X  Against HTML                       aka dive
/ \ Email!