It gets worse.  I tried to have another go at it last night, and managed to 
knock the power cord to the monitor, causing it to oscillate and 
fail.  Now, does anyone know where to get a nice LCD monitor cheap?

The outcome was, that since I had a heating valve replaced in the ceiling 
above the cupboard,  which broke one of the mirrored doors, which led to 
new doors of a different size, there is no way I can get into the vax.

However, I do remember the situation that arose and the reason I though it 
had worked:

I had a KA630 in a BA123.  It came with a four-connector cable, and, like a 
fool, I just assumed that it would work with three memory boards. So I had 
two four megs, an eight meg, and ran VMS with 16MB.  All went well for 
several years.

When I found out about the NetBSD project, I first tried running it one the 
same machine.  I can'y remember whether it found all 16 Megs, but it did run.

After accidentally destroying the vms drive, I stopped dual-booting and 
converted an 11/73 to Vax use by taking one of the four meg boards from the 
BA123 and putting it with a four meg spare, making 9 megs in the ba23 for 
vms and leaving the four plus eight giving me thirteen in the BA123.

Now that I have figured out what I did, I am even more sure that I did get 
three working, because I didn't know I couldn't!  However, unless the 
building shifts, it is going to be a long time before I can get into the 
VAX to help unlock its secret. Maybe the Titanic will yield its secrets 
first.  I am doing an MSc. and my next course starts next Thursday, so I'm 
afraid NetBSD is going to have to go onto the back burner for awhile.

Sorry I couldn't point to a smoking gun.

Regards

Nigel Johnson

At 18:07 03-03-11 -0500, der Mouse wrote:
>For those of you who are following the saga of my attempts to use three
>boards of RAM with a KA630, a discussion with a friend yesterday
>brought up another possibility: that slot 4's CD interconnect is toast
>in my backplane.
>
>I moved the CPU up to slot 2 and used RAM in slots 3 and 4, with slot 1
>empty.  Worked fine.
>
>You may recall that I had a number of CPU boards that failed POST, one
>that passed POST and booted with 5M, and one that passed POST and
>wouldn't boot.  I've added debugging code and I find that the one that
>wouldn't boot sees only 5M anyway, so I doubt I'll bother chasing down
>the details of why it's walking into the istack redzone.
>
>The person who contacted me off-list wrote back saying he couldn't at
>the time, but would open up his BA123 and look.  I haven't heard back
>since, but that was only a day or so ago, so I don't think that means
>anything except that he hasn't had time to rearrange computers (a
>problem I can certainly relate to).  For the time being, though, I'm
>going to operate under the assumption that my KA630s, at least, just
>can't do three boards of RAM.
>
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