At 01:32 PM 12/4/96 -0500, Bruce Drake wrote:
>On Wed, 4 Dec 1996, Darren Reed wrote:
>
>> 
>> Sorry if I confused people, but I meant the "yellow drive light" goes on
>> (non-blinking), C-A-A "resets" it, but returns to the same status, and
>> it stays hung there.  The screen color is white or a very light shade of
>> gray.
>Ahh, but a light grey screen is also one of the "colored" traps of the ilk
>we were discussing earlier.  When I have the time in the evenings to dig
>some old notes out, I come back with a more concise description of the
>problem.  Hang in there! 

If you can come up with notes on:
1) What flashing caps-lock lights mean, and
2) What the different combinations of power-led flashings mean,
I'd much appreciate it. I searched BIX and didn't find it.

>Essentially, the problem is the same: the system is in a state that cannot
>handle the Amiga's boot ROMs to continue for some reason, and the color is
>indicative of the reason.  If I remember right, and this is not to be
>taken as authoritative, but yellow means the MMU is active, green means
>memory test problems, red means custom chipset problems, but I forgot what
>grey means.  There is a blue one too that I forget about also.

Yellow == Exception before the main exception handling code is in place, i.e.
it can't put up a Guru msg, because the system isn't up that far. The example
that was given before for this was the case (and Bruce, I know you know this!)
where the A3000 daughterboard isn't in place on startup. Like when adding 
RAM or something, and you don't feel like putting it totally back together
just to test it. 

Any number of things could cause a yellow screen. If the MMU is on, Bruce says
that that could be a problem. If the daughter board is out, that's a problem.
If a program patched itself into the system startup vectors (with a RomTag
if I'm not mistaken), it might crash and cause a yellow screen. 

Boot sequence goes:
Black, Grey, White. 

I believe grey means the hardware passed, and white means the ROMs passed.

Blue might mean the ROMs failed. Hung on black might mean the hardware is
hosed, and not working well enough to run the self-tests. This can happen
if, for example, you have a Z-III board that isn't happy with your board
and chipset. 

Another instance of the black screen is when you can't get pair of cards to
work, but they do work when rearranging them. I saw this problem, and it
ended up being a power supply that was going out on me.

Hung on white typically means (on my 3000) that the SCSI is hosed up. Time
to check cabling. Also, a very very long time spent on white before it comes
up can also mean cabling problems. 

I think Bruce hit on the problem when he mentioned C= having to publish 
The Right Way to reboot. Anybody have this documentation? Since my startup
problems (w/ yellow screen) are cured with a three-finger-salute, I'm 
willing to bet that we're just not rebooting correctly. 

If somebody has real documentation on this, feel free to override me.
--
XCOMM Kevin P. Neal, Sophomore, Comp. Sci. -   kpneal@pobox.com
XCOMM     http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/       -   kpneal@eos.ncsu.edu
XCOMM "Comments in code are kinda useless, anyway."
XCOMM   -- Brian Rumple, TA for my OS class, NCSU. November 6,1996