HP9000 Boot up problem

[PaulO_49]

Hi.

Due to contractual requirements our company must maintain the following old equipment to develop our embedded software which runs on 80C196KB microcontrollers:-

HP-UX 7.0B OS running on HP9000-300 CPU
HP64000 Emulators
8096/80C196 assembler/linker suite

Following a recent power cut, the system will no longer fully boot up and hangs at the following boot-up check:-

..
DMA-C0
RAM 8388356
HP98644 (RS-232) at 9
HP98642 (RS-232 MUX) at 13

Can anyone please advise or point me towards someone/a company that deals with obsolete HP equipment? Any help at this moment will be appreciated.

Many thanks.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Ebay.

http://www.ebay.com

You may have to wait a while to find this.

HP-UX 7.0. Does that pre-date Bill Hassell?

SEP

[Peter Godron]

Paul,
all I can suggest is starting to remove the faulty bits of the machine unless you need them. Can you reuse from another machine?

Otherwise go to your fallback machine or invoke the disaster recovery plan set up when the contract was signed to keep running on a system of this age.

[OldSchool]

You might try North American Systems. I've used them for some bits that were out of support.

I'm not sure, I believe they also offer service as well

IIRC: the individual I dealt with was Tom Huelsman (Tom H something anyway).

see www.nasi.com

[Bill Hassell]

This may be a disk problem, or a I/O problem -- no way to tell since the equipment is so very old and it has only trivial selftests and diagnostics. Before you get a replacement box, do you have a (tested) disaster recovery plan? If you have lost the disk and don't have a backup or installation media, restoring the system may be impossible. The disks used for a 7.0 version of HP-UX will be very difficult to find as they were so small (a few hundred megs) and you can't use modern multi-Gbyte disks as the driver may not recognize them.

I would get several systems from eBay or other hardware vendors, then verify each system works and try to use the old disk(s) to bootup. You'll need to match the model (the 300 series has several models) and I/O cards in the same slots.

[BUPA IS]

hello paul,
There are two companies that I know of in the uk that do used spares for old hp kit . I will post their web contact pages if hp moderator permits .
regards
Mike

[Andrew Rutter]

paul,

It depends upon whick 300 series machine it is? do you know?

310/320/330/345/etc

On these machines there is a set of LED's behind the front panel at the right hand side as you look through the grill.

post these, or where it stops at.

Also what else is connecetd to the computer?

does it have an external disk. probably HPIB, if so disconnect this and power it up on its own and make sure the led goes green, or passes its own self test. Also what part number disk and led state.

The 300 has detected and counted its memory and picked up the 2 cards, is there any more in there? if not its probably looking for the disk to boot from.

ANdy

[PaulO_49]

Firstly, thank you for all of your responses. I've only been able to have a brief look into this problem since my post, but here is an update.

SYSTEM DESCRIPTION:

The workstation is a HP9000 Model 360 Turbo SRX.

There are two units connected together, each labelled "HP9000 300" and each with four card slots at the rear. The bottom HP9000-300 unit has a hand written label labelled "CPU (360)".

The first HP9000-300 unit has the following 3 cards installed:
[1]Slot 1: HP ADC 98640A
[2]Slot 2: ASYNC MUX 98642A
[3]Slot 4: ASYNC MUX 98642A

The second HP9000-300 unit has the following 2 cards installed:
[1]Slot 2: (no ID but has the following
connections: LAN, RS232, AUDIO, HP-
HIL, HP-IB)
[2]Slot 4: HP98762A LOCAL GRAPHICS BUS
INTERFACE

300MB Root Disk: HP7959B

HP98730A Graphics H/W

I have tried to record the LED sequence behind the grill of the CPU, but it is very blurred and I cannot make out how many LEDs there are, maybe 3 or 4. I will try to record the LED sequence at power up (.mpg file) and post these. However, no green LED illuminates at any point, and it seems that there are two red LEDs lit at the point where the boot process halts. Prior to this the LEDs are changing, but always red or 'off', never green.

After trying to boot up several times with various h/w connected/disconnected, I managed to get past the 'hanging' stage (I didn't note the LEDs). The connections at this point were all the h/w described above. It quickly skipped through a number of messages which I couldn't record, and then started a FILE SYSTEM REPAIR. From experience I know that this takes a long time so I left the room for a couple of hours. I didn't actually see the order of messages, but when I returned to the room the following message was on the screen:

'Server not responding for YP domain "sundunlop"; still trying 106.07.19.13 hpmaster pid = 177 /etc/ypbind'

The message kept appearing every 40s or so, with the pid number incrementing each time. Despite this, I managed to get to the login prompt but received the following message when I tried to log in:-

'getty: cannot open "tty00" errno:6'

It then returned to the login screen, with the 'Server not responding . . . ' message once again being displayed at regular intervals.

I re-booted several times after this but each time the problem reverted to that described above.

The last message displayed during power-up, before the system hangs, is 'HP98642 (RS-232 MUX) at 13'. Does anybody know if this means that the MUX is okay and it's the next device that has failed (whatever that may be), or does this mean that it is checking the MUX and fails on this check?


I do have a recovery system available but it is a 400 series computer running HP-UX 9.0. Though the assembler suite of software is the same as that installed on the HP9000-300 series computer , there is still a lot of set-up and verification work required before it can be used for formal software builds. Besides, this 'new' recovery system is also obsolete so a back-up for this will also be needed! I am going to start working on this soon but at the moment I need the quickest solution, hopefuly a replacement part for the older HP system.


Mike - those company names would be especially useful, maybe you could email me?

I will rate your responses once this problem reaches a conclusion. In the mean time thanks again for your replies and please keep them coming - someone out there must have the skills and experience (that's not a dig at your ages!!).

[Bill Hassell]

Well, the good news is that the system is actually booting up (your first messages showed the display seen after selftest). The HP7959B disk is a 300Mb SCSI disk (or 0.3Gb in today's nomenclature).

The "FILE SYSTEM REPAIR" message is normal for a forced reboot and will indeed take 10-20 minutes for a 300Mb disk.

> 'Server not responding for YP domain "sundunlop"; still trying 106.07.19.13...

This indicates that this system was integrated into an NIS (aka, YP or Yellow Pages) directory server which is no longer connected or responding. Hopefully, the root user's password is local and not part of the NIS system.

> 'getty: cannot open "tty00" errno:6'

This is more serious and may indicate that one or more of the device files for the console are missing. At this point, there may be a hardware problem but there is probably a software problem too and until you can get logged in as root, there is no way to repair the software, so a replacement computer may not help.

If you have another 300 or 400 series system, you might consider mounting the disk (you'll likely need to change the disk address on the 7959B temporarily) on another system. You'll need to use mknod to create the new devicefiles for the disk. It will need an fsck on the raw disk device before it can be mounted. You'll need to use another 300 or 400 series running 7.0 to check the devicefiles. The 9.0 400-series system may be OK as a reference but the revision difference is fairly large.

[BUPA IS]

hello,
hp have not jumped in to say yay or nay so try enline in scarborugh or synstar.
This is an idea based on a vague memory of a problem we have with an 800(I) similar vintage since it seems to pick up the first mux and lists it but not the second one it is likely that that is where the fault is (card or backplane slot) . A hardware manual will translate the card position to slot numer listed in the message. try boot up with that mux card physically uninstalled from the machine take stactic precautions as the older kit is more sensitive than newer kit.
Take care to check for bent pins before putting it back.
from another vague memory there was a huge jump from hp-ux 8.0 to 9.0 (including the introduction of system V unix ) then 9.04 followed very quickly to sort out 9.0 bugs
good luck
Mike

[Andrew Rutter]

paul,

from what you have said and on top of what bill has said, it looks like the main cpu board is ok and most of the system.

It wouldnt boot up if you had memory errors or cpu errors. memory errors with the turbo srx been more common. your not getting these.

you have a 360 possibly with an optional expander attached. this is linked through the case onto the backplane of the main 360 unit.( the one with the human i/f lan/hpib/rs232).

Also it looks like it one of the 98642A mux cards thats failed.

As it boots up it tests the cpu,mem and then through all the i/o cards going up through the select codes. The last one the system can see is at select code 13, set by switches on the mux card. Its probably not liking the other one.

The mux card failure would also go with the tty errors aswell on boot up.

Also the lan problem could be due to not been connected? you said you where disconnecting cables.

I would disconnect the hard disk and to stop further corruption and then remove the cards one at a time until it goes further than it does. should have a message like "searching for a system to boot"

The expander could also be disconnected from the backplane if you wanted to go further, but there is abit more to this and may not be necesssry.

The 98644A at 9 is the on board rs232 on the main human i/f card.



Andy

[PaulO_49]

Once again thanks for your responses. I will hopefully be able to get stuck into this problem next week and try your suggestions.

[Tall Paul]

Hi
This thread is a little old but hopefully you are still 'listening'. We are also running a legacy HP9000 series 300 system and have a couple of items spare which you may be interested in to help you out:
HP7959B hard disk
HP98642A Async MUX
Both working as far as we are aware.
You can get our contact details at www.ingenu.co.uk
Thanks