delay startup

[Willem Grooters]

Environment: Alpha PWS600, system disk via HSZ50 in BA356 shelf, but it might apply to other environmenst as well.
The Alpha system is set up to boot on power-on (AUTOSTART=BOOT).

After power loss on both Alpha and storage fails the Alpha does not boot, but when storage is kept on power, it will. My impression is that initialization of the Alpha is simply too fast - it will try to access the HSZ50 before that finishes it's initialization sequence (including spinning up the disks).

I have no output or logging - this usually happens when I'm not around :(

My idea is to have the Alpha wait a while (say: 1 minute) to allow the HSZ50 to do it'sjob and get up, before the Alpha starts to start the boot sequence. Is this possible, and if so, how?

SRM is up-to-date (latest release)

[Karl Rohwedder · Accepted solution]

Perhaps you can use the 'nvram' startup script feature to setup a delay, there is the sleep function available.
You edit the script with 'edit nvram', but be careful.
Note: I have not used this feature by myself and I don't know, if the PWS600 firmare supports this.)

regards Kalle

[Jon Pinkley]

I've never had a PWS600; does it do a full memory test on power up? If so you could buy more memory :-)

[Willem Grooters]

Kalle:
I don't know if it's possible but it's worth a try. I'll dig the docs on this

Jon:
No full memory test, and if enabled, it would be slow enough. Though more memory is useful for other reasons.

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

I booted my AS500 from cd and disk. It tried a few seconds (invain because no cd) with the cd before switching to the disk. May be try that to delay the boot. Or specify the same device multiple times (can't test it because it finds the disk directly in my case).

Wim

[Richard W Hunt]

It is my impression that you are running only into HSZ50 init, not actual disk delays. Once the HSZ's are "awake" they will accept the I/O request but just stall you. Maybe you need to look at SYSGEN parameters such as MVTIMEOUT. If that is too low, you would "give up" too soon.

[Willem Grooters]

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll look into each of them and pick the one most useful.