Problem solved: It was the power supply.

Odd though, looking at the back side, core I/O, FW SCSI, and so on, all 
appeared to have power. This is why I found it hard to believe that the 
power supply was the problem. Charles Johnson of Surety Systems replaced 
the power supply for me. He explained that (back in the day) HP 
engineered some of the best power supplies in world, lots of checks and 
verifications. Even though the power supply had actually supplied DC 
power to the various components, it was not able to verify it.

So the message "Proceeding to turn on DC power" remained on the front 
panel display, meanwhile the boot process on the console would hang, and 
if you do a <cntrl-B>, RS it would time-out with a msg:

"FATAL ERROR: System held in reset. POW_ON never came back (APERR 21)"
"Waiting until it's reasserted......"

Bill & Dave's Excellent Machine, even with a power supply failure, it 
still manages to get a message out (in plain English) attempting to 
explain the failure.

Sadly, another bittersweet migration to do.

--
Michael Anderson


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