some time ago i found a mainboard from IBM Personal Power Systems 830. it's a PReP (or CHRP, i'm not sure) from about 1995[1]. i don't have a parity SIMMs and a cache module, that this machine was originally equipped with. yesterday it was working fine. well, almost - i couldn't figure out how to make it boot netbsd, it got hang after loading the image, however it could load SMS and pass all the test without problems. nevermind. one of things i tried was to update firmware to the latest (v1.10, from p8x0_110.exe, downloaded from ibm ftp site) version. now, during boot, when displaying the memory icon it makes a short beep and hangs, w/o any error icon. can anybody experienced with this hardware tell me, what should i do now? i guess nobody at ibm tested it without parity memory and without l2 cache module. should i get parity simm's, or a good soldering iron and memory flasher? silly me. before updating, i got into a firmware command line and made it load new firmware into memory and jump to it's entry point. it hanged in the exact same way it does now, except it showed an 'error 00020000' icon. i thought, 'well, it tries to reinit some device that does not like it'... and flashed the verified-not-to-work firmware into rom. [1]. so, strictly speaking, it's offtopic here. it wasn't too popular, however, and this is the most appropriate mailing list i found.