FWIW, Lars recommended a couple of things for me to try on this problem,
and I just wanted everyone to know the results, in case you ever have a
similar situation with a much more important machine (like a production
one).

At the ISL> prompt I ran STAGEISL, instead of START, issued a "SET BASE"
command, and exited back into ISL, then did the START as usual.  It went
farther, and gave no errors -- until it expired on another SA1798.
Hmmm.

So then I tried the second option suggested, that being enter "SARTBASE"
at the ISL> prompt instead of START.  This worked.  (So where does one
find the docs on STAGEISL and STARTBASE?)

Now I'm gonna patch it by TAPE -- NOT stages.

(Which wouldn't have worked for me too well in production anyway since
I'm a Netbase customer, which blows the whole "let's do the patch
selection and prep work while users are logged on" idea -- but I wanted
to see how well this "Staging" concept works.  Ah well.)

Thanks!

Curtis

>----------
>From:  Curtis Larsen
>Reply To:      Curtis Larsen
>Sent:  Wednesday, June 10, 1998 12:27 PM
>To:    [log in to unmask]
>Subject:       (Non-Critical) SA1798: Wha Happon?
>
>I just had an interesting System Abort on my little crash-and-burn 922.
>
>I'm playing with staging areas to see how well they work, and after
>using Patch/iX to create one in an effort to apply three reactive
>patches, I ran STAGEMAN to SET the stage area ("three_tenors") and then
>I shutdown/rebooted the box.
>
>Lo and behold, when I try to START the system at the ISL prompt I get:
>
>WARNING - START and NL do NOT match; system may not run.
>          status - subsys: #526; info: #1604
>
>
>Then, after pausing to consider this dilemma, the system says:
>
>ERROR, start and NL do NOT match.
>SYSTEM ABORT 1798 FROM SUBSYSTEM 107
>SYSTEM HALT 7, $0706
>
>
>Pretty neat, huh?
>Just offhand, I'd say the problem was due to the START and the NL being
>different.  :P
>But.......Why?
>
>Does anyone know what I may have done wrong, and/or if there's a way I
>can still boot from disc?
>(I can boot from tape, it's just annoying and V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W since I
>have an ORIGINAL DDS drive.  Yep -- HP-IB -- and my SCSI DDS is
>temporarily re-assigned.)
>
>
>So, how does one recover from such a situation?
>If I _do_ boot from tape, will I then be able to run STAGEMAN and SET
>the stage area back to BASE?
>
>Thanks, Mahallo, Danke, and Domo Arigato.
>
>Curtis
>