New backplane arrives...

...and no change in behaviour. Poop.

Meanwhile, I've had some interesting conversations with Peter from Ireland who also has an AlphaServer 2100 (among other items), and he's filled me in on a couple of things plus described some of his own issues:

• PSU labels: the top LED is labelled AC OK and the bottom LED is labelled DC OK.
• SYSTEM RESET only appears very briefly after the reset button is pressed

• His machine previously had some power/fan issues, which would sometimes lead to nothing appearing on the OCP at power up, and no boot. This was normally fixed with another power on. Subsequently replacing the IO board appears to overcome this, but the CPUs and memory have also been changed since then.

• Running an EV4 4/275 CPU module with an IO board running EV5 firmware leads to "FAIL I/O_00 0004" being displayed on the OCP. (I think this is also what you see when the FSL firmware boots, but I'll need to recheck the docs).

• He has 2x 5/300 CPU modules, which both register OK in SRM, but his VMS currently only sees one. Both pass with P (rather than F for Fail) in the SRM tests, but whichever one is in slot CPU1 results in the ID of ?????-? being shown. 

• Like a previous suggestion from a reader of this blog, he has suspicions that the IO board could cause problems if the battery/realtime clock had died. On the IO board, this is the DALLAS DS1287 and he wonders if perhaps surgery such as this could solve it? 

I have ordered 1x 5/300 CPU module from Ebay thinking that this is the next most likely component to have failed. If it turns out to the be the battery on the IO Boards, then hey, I'll have 3x CPUs for VMS to ignore.