Strange Characters during boot up

[Jeff Schussele]

Hey...Hey...Hey...somebody's sporting some new headgear!!!

One last shot:
Ioninitrc runs several binaries - ioscan insf, etc - I assume you checked them - but what about std direction. I believe stdout is redirected to null, but what about stderr? Try running the ioscan & insf as in the script & see if you get any errors. Maybe it's kicking out something that wigs the terminal.

Good luck Kel - I'm running out of ideas,
Jeff

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Kelli,

Though i had been following this thread for some time, i can't think of a reson why you should be getting the junk display on console. Only one more thing comes to mind. Interrupt the boot process and explore the settings over there. Looks for some setting where the console baud rate and terminal type is configured. If you find it, set it to 9600 baud, no parity, 8 bits, terminal type=vt100 and try.

I can't think of any other suggestion.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

I think I have an answer. The strings look an awful lot like the normal boot sequence with rc scripts showing their status...except the characters are wrong. My giess is that the characters are correct and your terminal is TOO smart. Any character with the 8th bit set on maps to a special character; in other words, you have a 256 character emulator, not a 128 character emulator. Somewhere in the start of rc scripts, the stty settings have turned on parenb, a very bad thing to do.

(I know, HP has shipped gettydefs in this broken state for modem support for the last 18 years) but somehow, stty has been changed to turn on parity generation during the rc startup. Start by looking at inittab for console and just for grins, ook at the console entry in gettydefs (or better yet, replace /etc/gettydefs with /usr/newconfig/etc/gettydefs). Check the very first rc scripts being executed for stty values too. Make sure -parenb (not stty parenb) is set. Since this recently happened, look at the files in descending date order:

ll -t /sbin/init.d/

[Kelli Ward]

Yep,
I should be satisfied w/ my baseball cap for a couple days or so and then start pining for a graduate cap! I feels great! I'll keep plugging.

Jeff and Bill - I will check your suggestions tommorow. I've released the system for use today. (The sequence is more of an annoyance than something that hinders use.)

Sanjay - I will check on the firmware settings if I can find them. This ROM has a fairly unique interface. It's menus are fairly limited. A kind of press this # to go here, press that # to go there kind of thing. If you've never seen one in action, it is unlike pretty much unlike any other HP system I've ever seen. In fact the 743 is the only system I've seen with this firmware style. Even the 745 next generation model uses the more common main menu setup. I don't recall seeing terminal setups in it, (admittedly never needed to look and haven't noticed) but I will hunt around and see if I can check your suggestion as well.

Thanks all,
Kel