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From: webb@ibmpa.awdpa.ibm.com (Bill Webb)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: RT gets hung trying to boot AIX
Message-ID: <1990Nov20.130945@ibmpa.awdpa.ibm.com>
Date: 20 Nov 90 21:09:45 GMT
References: <1990Nov20.024410.1932@ultra.com>
Sender: news@panews (news id)
Reply-To: webb@ibmpa.awdpa.ibm.com (Bill Webb)
Organization: IBM AWD Paloalto
Lines: 43

In article <1990Nov20.024410.1932@ultra.com>, marty@ultra.com (Marty
Lyons) writes:
|> Sometimes (approx. 75%) when I power up my RT, it will get stuck in a
cycle
|> of spinning the floppy disk drive, and never goes to the hard disk
to
|> finish booting AIX.  Other times, it will poll the diskette drive
once,
|> then find the hard disk and come up fine.  I end up power cycling 
|> (admittedly, a rough procedure on the machine) until it finds the
hard
|> drive so I can get the thing running.
|> 
|> Is there a jumper I can change somewhere to tell the EESDI controller
to try
|> to boot from the hard drive first, then diskette?
|> Marty Lyons, Ultra Network Technologies, 101 Daggett Dr, San Jose, CA
95134 USA
|> (408) 922-0100 x196, marty@ultra.com, "Home of the 1 Gigabit/Second
network"

First, part of your problems may be a bad battery. Many of the used
machines that we got had dead batteries. The battery costs about $11
at Fry's. The battery maintains information in CMOS that contains
(among other things) the boot order. If you system can't maintain
the date properly over power down's that is a good sign that the
battery
is dead or dying. 

In any case, AIX allows you to set the boot order (or at least the 
first entry in the boot order) from the keyboard. If I remember 
correctly, to set it to boot first from the disk 1 hit
control-alt-num-1.
(e.g. hit control + alt + numeric pad "1"). In any case the VRM 
techinical reference manual should have this information (when you
get it). Otherwise it can also be done with the 4.3 "sautil" 
diskette using the "ipl" menu entry. Call me the above isn't
sufficient.

----------------------------------------------------------------
The above views are my own, not those of my employer.
Bill Webb (IBM AWD Palo Alto), (415) 855-4457.
UUCP: ...!uunet!ibmsupt!webb