10 Aug
2012
10 Aug
'12
6:42 a.m.
On 10 Aug 2012, at 12:41, John Many Jars wrote:
...in a closet here. They used to have a bunch of
these were I used
to work, as a CAD system.
Nice little RS/6000s - my friends has one. I have a 7046-B50 which I believe is
effectively a cluster node server version of the same architecture. Makes a lot better use
of a 604e than Apple ever did ;)
This one has AIX on it... it fails bootup and drops
you to some sort
of prompt right after it plays it's tune (with the little speaker
icon).
My B50 sulks if the NVRAM battery dies (if it's been sat in your closet then it likely
is dead). It forgets what device to boot from and all sorts and most often locks up on
boot.
At that screen you should be able to hold down a key, something like F2 or something to
access the SMS menu. That will allow you to access a boot device menu and reset it.
Service Manual: http://www.g8wrb.org/useful-stuff/IBM/RS-6000/7043-43P-Series/380512.pdf
All he answers are in there in typically cryptic IBM style :)
You can type ls at the prompt and gets what looks like
a list of devices
Yup, that'll be the OpenFirmware prompt. It likely didn't find a boot device or
the boot device failed and it dropped out to the OFW prompt to allow you to poke it.
Should I bin it, or is it worth trying to fix? Anyone
point me in the
right direction?
Absolutely not. RS/6000s (and especially 43Ps) are like tanks. I only turn my B50 on twice
a year at best yet it still works like a charm (unless I have to fit yet another NVRAM
battery ;) )
Totally fixable. At worst it might need a new hard drive. IIRC the 43p used 68-pin SCSI
LVD drives so that shouldn't be SO hard to fix.
I only dug it out because of the CDE thread, so
it's "all your fault!"
k-pthooey. CDE.
--
Mark Benson
http://DECtec.info
Twitter: @DECtecInfo
HECnet: STAR69::MARK
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