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Alphaserver 8200 won't power up

 
Mario Stargard
Advisor

Alphaserver 8200 won't power up

We have an as8200 that went offline abruptly. Trucluster moved the services to a backup node. The console is connected to the serial port via a terminal server (decserver 90m). When we try to power it up all we get on the serial console is "þþþ" and then nothing more. These symbols are part of the regular bootup, but now this is all we are getting. Google didn't turn up anything.

Anyone have any useful suggestions on how to go about diagnosing this?

Thanks,
Mario
3 REPLIES 3
Allan Bowman
Respected Contributor

Re: Alphaserver 8200 won't power up

Mario,

I'm not sure if the forum is changing the characters, or if your boot prompt is not displaying corectly. The boot prompt should be ">>>" (three greater-than signs). You should be able to just type "boot", or "boot diskname". Of course this also assumes that the console mode is set to SERIAL and it is not trying to output to a VGA monitor.

Allan in Atlanta
Mario Stargard
Advisor

Re: Alphaserver 8200 won't power up

We're not getting to the SRM or the AlphaBIOS. The hardware POST doesn't run. We know the terminal is connected and configured properly because it's been working for years. There's no graphics head and even if there were, we'd still see the POST messages on both the graphics head and the serial terminal.

The diagnostic light on the front panel is lit steadily. The manual tells me that this is a "fault on system bus".

Thanks,
Mario
Larry De Clay
Frequent Advisor

Re: Alphaserver 8200 won't power up

Mario,
You can try to remove all the CPUs and memory boards and start with only one CPU and memory board. May be some board is hanging the bus.

Good luck,
Larry