Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!uunet!mcsun!ukc!mucs!els!dente
From: dente@els.uucp (Colin Dente)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: DN3500 refuse to get into DM
Message-ID: <570@m1.cs.man.ac.uk>
Date: 16 Jan 90 10:14:01 GMT
References: <1990Jan12.172440.851@me.toronto.edu>
Sender: news@cs.man.ac.uk
Reply-To: dente@els.ee.man.ac.uk (Colin Dente)
Organization: University of Manchester, UK
Lines: 36

In article <1990Jan12.172440.851@me.toronto.edu> sun@me.utoronto.ca writes:
>There is a strange thing happen to an Apollo DN3500 that I've never
>seen and doesn't seem to find a cure for it. We've phoned up Apollo
Help might be at hand...

>... it just won't
>load DM. I tried soft boot it (shutdown and reboot) and hardware reset
>(press the little white button at the back of it). Everything went
>well (disk check passed, salvage boot volume okay, loading Init okay)
>but that's it. It threw me back to a "Phase II Shell" with a ")" prompt
>instead of loading the display manager and ask for login. I manually
>type in dm to try loading DM from that shell, but all I got was something
>like (pm_$init) 3040001. I can still access its disk from the other SR9.7
>machines (so the network is probably okay), but I cannot get it to do
>anything else. Anyone have seen this kind of thing happened before?

I do remember having a problem like this - though I don't recall getting
a returned status of 3040001 (cleanup handler released out of order) -
sounds *weird*.  The problem that I had was that /dev/null had somehow
been corrupted - causing the DM to gracelessly exit when you tried to
start it.  I tried starting the DM with debug set to 1 - no help.  In the
end, out of desparation, I invoked spm with debug (dunno if the debug was
necessary) - and lo and behold - the last thing it did before dying was
print something like 'cant open /dev/null'.  One new /dev/null later, and
everything was hunky dorey - far more pleasant than the OS reload that
Apollo suggested.

Colin




 Colin Dente                      | JANET: dente@uk.ac.man.ee.els
 Dept. of Electrical Engineering  | ARPA:  dente@els.ee.man.ac.uk 
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