AlphaStation 200 NVRAM Problem

Peter Coghlan cctalk at beyondthepale.ie
Mon May 2 04:42:21 CDT 2016


> >
> >  One possibility I have in mind is it's something peculiar about DRAM.
> > As you may have been aware DROM code isn't run directly, it's loaded by
> > SROM into DRAM.  If it fails a specific bit pattern at a specific location 
> > some reason, then you might see symptoms like these.  So shuffling DRAM
> > modules might change something here.
>
> I will give this a go, but it seems unlikely as the machine is able to run
> VMS, and I assume it must be passing at least some basic memory tests.
>

Perhaps VMS could be working around correctable memory errors that SROM
is not able to cope with?  If this is the case,

$ SHOW ERROR

should give a clue and there should be further information in the error log.
(I'm not sure how you display that since the functioning of $ ANALYZE /ERROR
got messed up on Alpha some time ago.)

Regards,
Peter Coghlan.


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