friedl@mtndew.Tustin.CA.US (Steve Friedl) (08/19/90)
Hi folks, I have been having the damndest time getting a customer machine back up after a crash this weekend, and I am baffled as to why it is not cooperating with me. They have a 3B2/600 running SVR3.2, and they have a 60MB cartridge tape and a pair of internal hard drives (all of this is SCSI). The root drive has a corrupted VTOC (probably my own damn fault), so I figured I would just boot from the OS tape and fix it right up. Fat chance. When I try to boot the machine, it does the SELF TEST and then hangs, presumably trying to filledt or run diagnostics off the hard disk. If I hit the reset, I get the traditional SYSTEM FAILURE HAS OCCURRED, but the only boot device it allows me is FD5 -- no SCSI choice. This is not a case of simply a missing name for an existing slot that would happen if filledt failed: the choices just aren't there. When I try to boot the essential utilities floppy to run filledt, it fills a few slots and then powers down the machine: great! I can't boot dgmon or /unix either. None of this changes if I reset the NVRAM first. What is happening here? I understand that maybe it can't boot from the hard disk, but why in the world won't it let me boot from tape? I really gotta get this machine working when I go out there on Monday morning at 6AM :-( Any help would be really appreciated. Steve -- Stephen J. Friedl, KA8CMY / Software Consultant / Tustin, CA / 3B2-kind-of-guy +1 714 544 6561 / friedl@mtndew.Tustin.CA.US / {uunet,attmail}!mtndew!friedl Combat global warming -- leave the refrigerator door open