Not Quite DOA...

It might have only cost £10 on Ebay, but this thing weighs about 75kg, and organising a courier cost me £114 for the 377 mile trip from Ayr, Scotland to my home in Abergavenny, Wales. And that's after the first courier turned me down flat...

So, I paid up, and it soon arrived. It took two of us to wheel it from the driveway up to the house and struggle with it through the door. Once embedded in the study, I plugged in the two (!)  standard PC power supply cables, attached a VGA cable and a PS2 keyboard, and turned it on.

SYSTEM RESET said the operator console panel in bright green text.

Wow. It isn't dead. The Ebay listing had said:

The server hardware is complete with CPU, memory, networking, etc. but has not been booted for a while so it might not work.  

Operating system currently loaded is NT 4.

Consequently, I didn't know if this machine was going to power up or not. But you can (usually) replace failed components, from PSUs to CPUs. Finding out what's broken and sourcing a replacement was going to be the main source of fun for this project. (Remind me of that sentence when, in eight posts time, I'm knee deep in PCBs and multimeters and tufts of pulled hair.)

But, powering up is good: the PSUs are presumably OK. The Operator Console Panel works. The six hard disks are lighting up and spinning up. Good, good, good!

These servers can run a number of operating systems. This one supports Microsoft's NT, as well as OpenVMS and Tru64 Unix from DEC. We won't mention NT any more than strictly necessary, and I have equally little interest in Tru64 Unix. VMS is my thing, here. If I wanted Unix, I'd stick with one of the many Linux boxes dotted around the place. (I've never really understood the non-Linux Unix enthusiasts who will only run FreeBSD etc. Then again, none of those people would understand why I want to get OpenVMS working on 17 year old hardware either, so hey-ho.)

I'd read through the owner's guide and firmware guide for the AlphaServer 2100 which still exists on HP's site (HP acquired Compaq, who had previously acquired DEC. So now many historical web references to http.digital.com or ftp.compaq.com etc., require translation to an equivalent HP site. If you're lucky.) The firmware guide suggested that SYSTEM RESET occurs after the system reset button has been pressed. Seemed reasonable.

However, the firmware guide doesn't mention what happens if the SYSTEM RESET phrase stays on the operator control panel permanently. Which presumably means this isn't normal.

At power-up, the AlphaServer 2100, like most (all?) Alpha systems normally enters SRM (system reference manual) prior to operating system boot so that you can do some high-level tinkering to reconfigure some of the hardware settings, e.g. change the location of the boot disk, etc.). The expected order of events here is:

Operator Control Panel powerup display -> System Startup Screen -> SRM

The OCP display should show a brief series of component test indicators. This is followed by a console (VGA or serial - as configured) display of the system startup screen describing CPU and memory and bus probe/test results, and finally the console prompt of SRM (or an alternative console called ARC, if you're booting to NT. We're *so* not booting to NT.)

But we're stuck on the OCP displaying 'SYSTEM RESET'. Hmm.

Time to power off and take a look inside.

Yes. That's mould. No. It shouldn't be there.

Scuzzy SCSI cables.

I took a look at the CPUs and memory. From the Ebay listing I was expecting 2x 4/275 CPUs (21064A = EV45 at 275 MHz ) and 2x ??? memory (either 128MB, 256MB or 512MB boards). I was very pleased to learn that there are actually 2x 5/300 CPUs (21164 = EV5 at 291 MHz) and 2x 512MB RAM boards present. A dual EV5 with 1GB RAM? For £10? Awesome! (Except it doesn't work).

The two CPU boards have the silver heat sink on them.

I removed each removable board and reseated them, and retried the system, same behaviour. Hmm.

Previously, on the IRC channel for VMS (irc.2600.net - channel #vms - do pop in and say hi!) I had some help locating the existing documentation for the AlphaServer 2100, along with some descriptions of the process of upgrading a 2100 from the 4/275 CPUs to the 5/300 (because I'd seen such CPUs for sale on Ebay). The conversations went along these lines: upgrade the SRM before you upgrade the CPUs or the system won't start. The SRM for EV45s won't work with EV5 CPUs.

Ah.  Could this be what the problem here is?

Then the machine powered itself off. I started it again and it went off again after a couple of seconds.

Arse.