if any of the self-tests complain, a decstation will stay at the chevron
instead of autobooting. do _both_ machines give you the message from the 
pmagb-b you mention? that is the video card complaining about something 
(probably something unimportant, but nonetheless, its something). Your 
video card(s) might just be getting flaky. One thing to check, sort of my 
mantra with DECstations, is dust and dirt. If it's been a while since the 
machines have been cleaned, it's worth it to put 20 min to cleaning
them out well. if you have a vacuum with a soft brush-attachment, that is
really good for cleaning stuff off. Reseating cards and memory modules helps
clean crud off the contacts in the connectors, too.. In any case, unless 
you make the POST complaints go away, your decstations will stay at the 
chevron when brought up or reset, and will ignore the autoboot flag. 
giving the 'boot' command will bring them up normally, though. the 
rationale behind doing this was to ensure the user notices if a test 
failed. 

isildur

On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, Daniel Senderowicz wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Perhaps someone can shed some light on a problem I have on 2
> different 5000/240. They used to automatically boot on power on,
> but they don't longer do that. When I power on the machine I get
> a message saying:
> 
> 	?TFL: #0 PMAGB-BA LINE: 15: Line Signature Mode Test
> 
> and after it goes through some tests. My ENV variables appear to
> be correctly set (after printenv), that is
> 
> 	haltaction=b
> 	boot=3/rz0/vmunix -a
> 
> The most intriguing thing is that both machines used to boot
> automatically and now they don't.
> 
> Dan Senderowicz
>