MicroVAX II

Yet another update on the MicroVAX II that seems to prefer dormancy... The KA630 was still hanging at '9', so after thinking it over, I pulled the backplane and checked it over again. I really don't like pulling it, since aligning it is somewhat of a pain. I didn't find any visible problems with it, but those threaded standoffs used to mount it kept unscrewing when removing the outer retaining screws. I decided to add a small bit of Loctite to each of the 8 inside screws to see if that will solve that problem. Once I got the backplane back in and aligned with the card cage, the system would constantly get to '6' and hang, which was further than '9'. I then tried cleaning the gold fingers of the card edge connector on the KA630, since it seemed to be the card at fault. Even though they looked clean, the amount of crud that came off with some isopropyl alcohol was startling. After cleaning that board and then the memory board, the system would reach '6', and error with a '?2' 'Failed.' message. I pulled the 4MB memory card and shuffled boards to keep the Q bus happy, and got a chevron prompt for possibly the first time with the KA630. So, it looks like I have either a fussy memory board or KA630. I've not yet tried the KA655 and associated memory cards in the BA123 again, but I may later. -Toth