Well this is a good news bad news kind of story.

The good news is that the VLC firmware is in EPROM and is not electrically 
reprogammable without removing the chips and putting them into a programmer.

The bad news however is that all lights on 7-4 means a main board POST 
error. My suggestion would be to try pulling memory simms to see if you can 
get a minimal system alive. If that doesn't have any effect (it won't 
unless the first SIMM is bad) then the next candidate is that your power 
supply isn't supplying all of the correct values.

--Chuck

At 05:46 PM 2/9/2003 -0800, Brian Chase wrote:
>Following a reboot of my VAXstation 4000 VLC, after having run it with a
>custom 1.6 kernel that stripped out some excess stuff from GENERIC, it
>now seems rather unhappy.  It no longer comes up to the firmware console
>prompt.
>
>Along the back there are some diagnostic LEDs.  At initial power up, all
>of the LEDs come on.  A split second later, the LED in position 1 goes
>dark.  It then stays dark and the machine sits there for as long as I've
>left it (20-30mins).
>
>     7654 3210
>     ---------
>     oooo oo.o
>
>Fortunately, I've a few other VLCs of the same type and firmware
>version on which I've not yet loaded NetBSD.  Cross-checking them
>with this system's current behavior, it's evident that something just
>isn't right.
>
>It's possible that this is just some hardware glitch that can be
>remedied, but given the history of nvram corruptions with the VAXstation
>4000/90s, I'm keeping that in the back of my mind.  Given that the VLC
>is a contemporary of the 90 and 90A in terms of its year of release,
>I suspect it has a similar type of reprogrammable firmware.  Perhaps
>I've tickled something with my custom kernel?  The GENERIC kernel seemed
>to work fine, even with multiple reboots.
>
>Anyway, I'd be curious to find out what the above LED pattern
>signifies.
>
>-brian.