I'm convinced that my house was built over an Indian burial ground. Or
it was owned by someone heavily invested in everything but DEC...
I powered up my AlphaServer 1000A last night and it looks like it has
problems too. It powers up and the drives & fans spin up. The lcd
showed 'ec.' only once, every other time it is blank. Nothing out of
serial port 1 and the onboard VGA never initializes.
I tried setting the 'failsafe boot' jumper and I put a blank floppy in
the drive just to see if it would try to read the floppy and it didn't
even try :(
Any ideas at all?
So now it looks like both of my alphas are shot (the PWS500au never
initializes video, does anything with serial, and turns off all diag
lights) and my DECStation 5000/120 has a bad power supply.
On the plus side, all of my terminals still work and both of my vaxes
(MicroVAX 3100/90 and VAXStation 4000/90) boot to VMS without
problems.
It brings me to a question: are the alpha systems inherently fragile?
The dead DECStation is an obvious hardware issue due to (probably) a
leaked capacitor which is understandable due to its age, but the Alphas
are just hosed in a software kind of way.
Brian