Options for resurrecting VAX 4000/400 and Vaxstation 3200

Thu Mar 10 06:40:42 CST 2016

On Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:09:02 +0100, Peter Coghlan  
<cctalk at beyondthepale.ie> wrote:

>
>>
>> I have two KA-675s for this beast: Board #1 (originally installed) has  
>> a failed B-cache (console reports SUBTEST_35_12,  
>> DE_B_Cache_diag_mode.LIS) and crashes with an asynchronous write memory  
>> failure when booting VMS from CD.
>>
>
> I wonder is there a way to disable the B-cache?

> I mention this because I have more than one Alphaserver 1000A with failed
> B-cache and I have found it is possible to work around this issue by  
> moving a
> jumper on the CPU board to disable the B-cache.  The result is that the  
> machine
> works with reduced performance.

Yeah, I wondered about that too, but there's no jumper on the KA-675.  
Interestingly the console firmware has no problem with the failed B-cache,  
or somehow bypasses it. Booting VMS fails though.

--GT

-- 
"END OF LINE" [MCP, 1982]
"... nowhere in the standards is it specified that 'programs that use a  
lot of memory may randomly crash at any time for no apparent reason'"  
[Stackoverflow forum, 2012]