thad@btr.BTR.COM (Thaddeus P. Floryan) (06/17/91)
In article <1991Jun17.040842.13298@mel.dit.csiro.au> hal@ditmela.mel.dit.csiro.au (Harold A. Miller) writes: | We have a dead 3b1. That may or may not be the "norm", I'm not used to the | machine. In any event, the video is gone, and there isn't anyone around | (of whom we're aware) who can fix it at a price that makes it worth the | fixing. In the mean time, the hard drive is full of stuff that would be | nice to recover. There is a set of backup floppies, too. | [...] Assuming it's only the video that has "died", you should be able to plug a terminal into the serial port (using the pinouts shown below), login, and do whatever recovery you deem necessary; this is assuming the /etc/inittab has an entry to spawn a getty on /dev/tty000 ... if not, then someone'll have to boot with the floppy boot disk and change the /etc/inittab .... not very easy if you cannot see echoes (on the monitor) of what you're typing. Good luck! Pinouts for a terminal to be attached to /dev/tty000: terminal serial port (2)--------------(3) (3)--------------(2) (7)--------------(7) +-------(6) | +-------(8) | +------(20) You "may" need to do a similar {6-8-20} jumpering at your terminal's end depending how your terminal is optioned. Thad Floryan [ thad@btr.com (OR) {decwrl, mips, fernwood}!btr!thad ]