Booting first time...

From: Oliver Skelton <oskelton_at_cix.compulink.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 8 May 98 15:37 BST-1

My AB040 continues to be erratic on boot as I believe many others are.
It either hangs at the stage of copying TOS to RAM, or gives bombs during
the subsequent auto folder execution.

I presume it is either a voltage, or more likely a temperature thing.
(Putting a multimeter on the 12V supply shows it starts off at over 13V
and then declines over a minute or so to about 11.8V)

If it is voltage, I wonder if there is a way to temporarily reduce voltage
during boot (a 'choke'!).

Now instead assuming it is temperature... at the moment I leave the initial
TOS count-down to proceed to it's conclusion before the machine starts to
boot - just to give it more time to stabilise. However, the machine is
probably more or less idle during this time and isn't heating up as much
as it could be.

Would it be an idea (and would some 'mug' do it?) to create an auto folder
program which sits and thrashes the cpu for a few seconds.
My idea is that you would have an AUTO program at the start of the folder
which would hammer the CPU for a configurable number of seconds (perhaps
configurable from filename as per FOLDER100.PRG?).
One objective would also be to make the output of the program
unimportant... so if an error occurs it hopefully doesn't matter.
I might then be able to cut down the idle boot wait at the start and get
faster and more reliable booting.

If it proved not to help, the program might need to be modified to thrash
other parts of the system (scsi) to warm them up - and we might learn more
about where the boot up problems lie.

Olly
Received on fr. mai 08 1998 - 23:18:00 CEST