>  I've got the mouse plugged in; however!  I've never used this thing
>before.  At one point (before I had the keyboard, monitor, and mouse) I
.attempted to make a loopback connector as specified in one of the
>DEC-faq's.  Would it have been possible for me to "fry" the mouse port?
>
>  I do get a FAILURE on the hardware test after the "3.." Initially, I
>thought this was because of the battery, which is dead, but now I'm
>thinking it could be the mouse since you mentioned it.

>  If it is the mouse (or worse, the mouse port) is there anything I can do
>to get the machine operational?  Ultrix will boot, but does give me an
>error (ws: boot test failure last byte -1 or something like that). 


Those errors are very relevant.  The PROM is saying it has trouble
with your mouse, and the Ultrix kernel is having porblems with your
mouse.

I'm assuming the keyboard is OK: if the Ni-Cds batteries are really
dead, you will have to re-enter the country code each time you
powercycle. If the keyboard works to do that, it works well enough to
boot.

Can you borrow another mouse, or try your mouse on a known-good
DECstation (or VAXstation 2000)?


I suppose I could try  adding a timeout and a more complicated state
machine for the mouse, but I'm pretty busy with   Real Work ...