Saturday, 8 February 2014

New I/O card and CPUs => SRM boot!

Over the last few months, I'd received a couple 'new' I/O cards but had no further success booting. My thinking is that perhaps *all* my I/O cards have EV4 firmware and won't boot the EV5 CPUs.

So I bit the bullet and picked up two EV4 275 Mhz CPUs from Ebay. I stuck one in, along with a VT510 terminal and voila, life!

The SRM console came up!

I viewed the devices present with show dev and saw the CD ROM showing as dka600. I put the Alpha 8.4 install disk in and was told the firmware was out of date:


I obtained the firmware 5.3 disk image and burned it on a macbook pro using Disk Utility. Selecting the defaults resulted in a successful firmware upgrade.

Having upgraded the firmware (via the CD ROM), I eagerly slapped in the install disk (also burned on the macbook pro) but found it continually causing read errors during boot. Progress, but no cigar...
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1 comment:

  1. rcyoung14 February 2016 at 13:13

    hey....I am also working on a 2100A 4//275. got this msg

    "FAIL I/O_00 0004"

    similar to what you reported. what did you finally do to resolve issue? Did you have to get new CPU cards?

    Oh where did you dig up firmware upgrades? I've been looking aroundonline and you seem to be one of the few (if not only) person to find any of them in the last 10+ yrs!!!

    reply to rcyoungiii@me.com if possible so I get it on my phone.

    ReplyDelete

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