Alpha Multia boot problems with Digital Unix.

From: Brian Benson <brian_at_kepler.lsmsa.edu>
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 12:14:21 -0500 (CDT)

I have three Multia's from digital. 166 mhz alpha's 1 with 128 MB's of
ram, one with 72, and one with 40. They each have a SCSI expansion bix.
the boxes and drives in each are identical. Only one ahs a cd-rom. they
just came out of storage and were running redhat linux. I tok the one with
128MB's of ram and attempted to boot it into Linux. it gave me the error

Hard Error----PKE Error #45

process Id Hard/soft
boot 000008 1 / 0


reported by pka0.0.6.0
end of error.

there is some other stuff in the error but, that is the main proble. Then
it dropped me back to a triple prompt. so, I assumed that the disk had
simply been formated...or I hoped it had been anyway. I popped my DU cd in
the drive and booted it. It scrolled errors about

Soft Error in dka100.0.6.0
 "not ready"

or that was the general error. ok...so I waited and it eventually booted
off of the cd. Once I got past the boot up, I didn;t have problems with
the cd again. It started the xserver. I did a custom installtion and it
went through the subesets. I thought, ok, no problem. When it went to
reboot after the instatllation however, I got the error again from pka0.
and then it gave me the line.

Booting digitl unix. monday December 29, 1997

and gave me the same hard error aas before except, this time instead of
complaingin about the boot, it complained about pka0_poll. then it dropped
me back to a triple prompt. OI rebooted from the cd, dropped into a unix
shell, and then fsck'd the hard drive. no errors...everything was fine. It
seems that I can write to the hard driv, can read from it and can read the
cd-rom, both of which are in the external caase. I tried changing out the
hardware. I took the same multia, with a different expansion and on boot
up got the same hard error. I changed out the multia, expansion, and cable
connnectng the two. In every case, I got the same error. When the
expansion is not on the multia, there's no error. I also made sure
everything weas terminated...I then took a terminator and pluged it onto
the back of the multia. the only thing I noticed in all three casses was
that if you moveed the terminator a fraction of an inch tout of position,
while still clipped on, the light on tthe end would go off. this is very
strange behavior. can anyone suggest a solution?
                                                        Thanx,
                                                        Brian

        
Received on Wed Jun 17 1998 - 19:13:07 NZST

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