[replying from work, sorry for any MS-outlook formatting woes...]

>long does iot;t take?  I'm giving it 1-10 minutes and it never comes
>back.

iot;t should take about 10-15 seconds depending on what's attached to
the scsi bus. It could be you have older PROMs which need to be told
manually what's on the scsi bus. :(

>One question--I have a six slot backplane, and currently have the
>mvme147 in the same slot the original mvme132 68020 board was in.

If the board is in the left-most slot (for vertically mounted racks), or
bottom-most slot (for horizontally mounted racks) you will have to
install the system controller jumper on the 147. From memory, this is
between the ROM chips and the big PCC custom chip near the VME
connector. For the time being, you shouldn't need to worry about any
jumper settings on the backplane itself.

>Other bad news on the board is that after attaching an aui to thinnet
>transciever on the aui port of the transition board, I see no light on
>the transciever (no power to the port), and after loading s-records for
>the sboot program, I get ethernet errors from the sboot program itself

Hmmm... Between the VME connectors at the back of the board is a fuse.
It should be green in color, and looks like a half-watt resistor. It
should be possible to just pull it out and check it with a meter (it's
socketed). Trouble is, the self-test should detect a blown fuse and
print a message at power-up... Do you get any lights on the 712
transition module? There should be two LEDs; one for transceiver power,
the other for SCSI termination power. Also, did you remember to enter
the ethernet MAC address using 'lsad'?

What version numbers are printed on the PROM labels of your board?

>I'm wondering if my mvme147 board isn't completely munged.

It sounds like it's a wee bit poorly at the moment!

Cheers, Steve