pes@ux63.bath.ac.uk (Smee) (07/07/88)
At home, I've got everything powered on one block, and just put in my floppy and flip on the power. Works OK. There *might* be some minimal sequencing (for relevance, read on) owing to the fact that my keyboard unit and disk drives are on the far side of a transient-suppressor from everything else (monitors, printer, modem). At work, where I have to manually switch each thing on individually, I've found two rules that seem to apply (experimentally). First (well known and obvious) I power up the external disk drive before the processor (so that the processor will recognize its existence during boot). Second (maybe less obvious), power on anything connected to serial and Centronics ports BEFORE powering on the processor -- or else leave them until the system has finished booting. If either of these (my work printer is prone to) generates a spurious interrupt during some window while the machine is booting, you seem to end up in a bomb loop.