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How to get Alphastation working?

A

aap

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Nov 4, 2015
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I have an Alphastation 400 4/233 that fails at the self test. The LEDs stop at FB, which is not a value listed in the manual.
A while ago it was in fact turning on and I was able to boot into windows nt 4, but it didn't take long to get a blue screen due to an icache fill parity error.
That sounded like a cache chip going bad and it is notable that LED errors codes F8-FA stand for failed memory tests, so maybe the chip is now totally broken.
Can anyone tell me what would be the best way to diagnose the fault?
 
Oh this is very interesting, but it seems somewhat contradictory. The "400 series user information" says FA means "Memory test 1 failure" but this document says FA means "Memory test 1 of 4 complete". Presumably FB could then mean Bcache initialization failed? I'm really a bit confused by this.
 
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Hm, I checked the LEDs once again and now I'm no longer sure it has anything to do with the bcache at all.
The bcache FB should be one of the first patterns, and indeed i see it but it doesn't stop there but continues through to D1 and *then* stops at FB.
Now both the ARC and SRAM flash reuse the F-range of LED values and indeed FB means "SRM initializing heap (dynamic memory)", but what it should be running is ARC and i don't see an FB value there...
I have no idea what's going on...
 
Two things come to mind. Are you positive the ram you have installed is appropriate? It's been a long time since I pulled my machine out but it wanted 72 pin stuff that was funky (needed parity and 36-bit or something like that which made most ram incompatible) The other is it might be trying to output on the console port as opposed to video.
 
Normally the last code you see isn’t the problem, but the last thing that wasn’t a problem.
 
The machine was running NT4 with that same ram, but crashing after a few minutes due to icache fill parity errors.
I also attached a serial console to both serial ports but got no output. And last time it worked it indeed gave me monitor output.

If FB is the last thing that wasn't a problem, that would mean it should fail at FA, but that's also "SRM initializing heap (dynamic memory)"...and again this machine was running ARC, so i'm not sure if my interpretation is even right here.

I tried removing all PCI and ISA cards, but still FB.
Some time ago when this first happened i took out some of the DRAM but that didn't make a difference.

I also don't believe the flashROM is wrong because it does a checksum check and doesn't complain.

Totally out of ideas....
 
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