On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Larry Liska wrote:

> I am a bit suspicious that maybe your cabling is off.  On my system, the
> discs are hooked to the HPIB connector that is connected to the card in
> slot #4 of the main CPU.  Have you tried this, or do you only have one HPIB
> socket on the backplane of your main CPU?

That HPIB cable running between the boxes, now that I poke around some
more and review the previous responses about ID'ing the boards in the
system, is from the PIC in the main cabinet to the INP in the expansion
chassis (I.e. not a PIC at all, just another HPIB device...). I looked at
the internal connection between the cabs (should I admit that it took me 2
hours to figure out how to get the front covers off???) and it looks ok.

Ok, here's one: following some friendly suggestions, I removed the ATP37
TIC's from the main cabinet and the expansion box and put the ATP-M card
in it's place, connected to the 8-port splitter panel. I then plugged a
standard modem cable from my DE9 laptop serial port straight into the
panel port "DC0" (I assume Data Console #0). Nothing! The lcd cycles
through like normal (5....B..........C) but, unlike the long wait with the
"C" console communication stage when using the old 3-pin ATP board, it
goes almost immediately to "1", the led's all flash briefly on the front
panel, and it reboots. Keep in mind that I'm using the same cable/terminal
(QCTerm) combo with the 3-pin board (same DE9-->DB25 modem cable connected
to my homebrew ATP-connector cable) and it works like a champ. I've tried
all of the ports and tried a null-modem cable in case I'm dreaming up
stuff about the ports being DCE instead of DTE. Any ideas anyone?

> > That all said, trying to do almost *anything* from the rom monitor gives
> > me a "Watchdog Timer Interrupt" message and returns me to the prompt.
> Just
> > to try to get anything, I've tried WARM, COOL, COLD, DISK, DUMP, PANEL;
> > all gave me that Watchdog message and dumped me back at the prompt. I
> also
> > get it in the TEST menu, when I run the IO test. Any ideas what might be
> > causing this?
>
> Ugh... mumble... no idea....  If your cabling isn't right, then maybe the
> I/O system is freaking out since it can't find any other devices to talk
> to??

I've sort-of traced it to the expansion box. If I unplug the expansion
unit and power on with the ATP37 TIC back in place, I get to the ctrl-B
prompt with no errors on any of the Iomap or CHannel tests. Ideas? I'm
going to remove all the boards from the expansion box and try it with one
in at a time and see if I can isolate something that way. I did notice
that if I try to boot with the expansion box plugged in with no cards in
it that the system hung with "0" on the lcd panel - cpu error, no?
Plugging in the INP fixed it, and I have this vague notion that this is
the "Micro" in "Micro3000 Upgrade"; I'm assuming that the board has some
kind of microcode on it that the system tries to load if it detects the
expansion box. But then I shot that theory to hell when I removed that
card again and plugged in only the LANIC card in the expansion chassis and
didn't get the static "0" on the lcd panel...

Regardless, it's after 2:00 am and I am using this as an excuse not to get
my work done...

Cheers,

Aaron