What happened to the graphics card.

From: MacDonell, Dennis <DennisMacDonell_at_auslig.gov.au>
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 18:52:34 +1000

Hi,

I have a Digital Personal Workstation 600au that was purchase from a Compaq
fire sale. The machine has a Powerstorm 4D51T graphics card which is
recognised via the console command "show config" as

Bus 0 Slot 12 DEC dhip 21052 PCI to PCI Bridge
   Bus 1 Slot 05 Cateyes 4D51T-2200

But the b*$%#_at_! thing is dead as a donut.

Background:
The system was working fine up until a week ago, when it was switched off,
while the office partitions were spun around. Then today when it was powered
up again, it failed due to a flat battery. We got the battery replaced and
still no go due to the fact that the console variable had reverted to
serial. The DEC techo trotted the box off to his workshop and using a
serially connected laptop and some graphics monitor that happened to be
lying around booted the box up. After all the boot messages were displayed
to the laptop, the login graphics was displayed to the graphics monitor for
a fraction of a second then it went a funny shade of blank.

Whats happened, has the graphics card been killed or are we missing some
special setting of a console variable. We had a similar sort of problem 12
months ago when we ordered a twin monitor card for a 500au machine, and
couldn't get the thing to work. Eventually we just stuck a single monitor
card in the machine and we were cooking with gas. From the archive it
appears that that problem might have been due to the voltages on the
back-plane, which can be cured with a back-plane upgrade. All sounds a bit
funny to me.

Anyway I was just wondering if someone out there had had a similar sort of
problem and had managed to sort it out.

Dennis Macdonell
email: mcdonell_at_auslig.gov.au
Received on Tue Oct 26 1999 - 08:59:20 NZDT

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