Hello !
The cause for the boot failure of our ES40 on wednesday has not been fully
resolved. The cause was indeed an erased EPROM, so ROM initialization failed,
and the failsave loader tried to load an uncorrupted image from floppy, which
was not available to us. Compaq technicians decided to burn a new firmware
onto the EPROM, and it apparently works even after repeated power cycling.
It's still unclear why the EPROM was cleared. Thanks to John Becker, Tom Blinn,
Nikola Milutinovic, and Alex Gorbachev for their quick help. The technicians
also pointed us to the following webpage where the most current bios updates
and update procedures even for cases as ours are available :
ftp://ftp.digital.com/pub/DEC/Alpha/firmware/interim/<machine>
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ORIGINAL MESSAGE:
>We have a major failure of one of our ES40 servers. Accidently I
>powered off the machine while running (power knob at the front).
>While booting, on the display it comes up with 'SROM 0 Mem Init',
>then 'LOAD ROM', then beeps 2 short , pause, 4 short, shows 'FLPY ERR',
>tries again 'LOAD ROM', beeps again and then halts with 'Jump to Console'
>and does nothing, no output on the graphics monitor. I powered down the
>machine several times completely, disconnected power cords, even changed
>the battery on the PCI board (we had problems with that thing when the
>machines were deliverd to us with empty batteries :-( ). Nothing helps.
>
>What happened ? Powering off the machine shouldn't have such drastic
>consequences, am I right ? What to do ? Thanks for any help you can
>give me. I will summarize.
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Dr. Udo Grabowski email: udo.grabowski_at_imk.fzk.de
Institut f. Meteorologie und Klimaforschung II, Forschungszentrum Karslruhe
Postfach 3640, D-76021 Karlsruhe, Germany Tel: (+49) 7247 82-6026
http://www.fzk.de/imk/imk2/ame/grabowski/ Fax: " -6141
Received on Fri Mar 03 2000 - 13:41:01 NZDT