DEC PWS 500au boot failure

This actually happened to me last month. I was taking a PWS 500 out of storage and, of course the battery was (presumed)dead. But I did not get any video and nothing out of the serial port. I was all set to use it for parts and took all the cards out of the pci slots. I hooked up the serial port and viola! I got some stuff out of the serial port. Remember the PWS 500 DEFAULTS to the ARC ( for windows) and it will take a while for it to output messages thru the serial port. Once you replace the battery, you can switch to the SRM console. After I got a prompt serial output, I replaced the cards, one at a time to make sure they were OK. You should also make sure the memory is well seated, also remember that the default procedure is for the machine to check memory, so until you can change the defaults in the firmware, it will take a while to boot. The card removal was a precaution as a faulty card may not allow it to boot. Good luck! Cheers tom On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 9:43 AM, Brian Wheeler <bdwheele at indiana.edu> wrote: