Autzoo.1278
hacknews
utzoo!henry
Thu Jan 14 17:42:38 1982
crashes
Bizarre episode just concluded.  We had a silent crash at about 1630.
No indication of anything special.  While coming back up, we unhooked
the main card reader and connected up the spare, just to pass the time
and get ready for some necessary testing.

The system came almost up and then got what looks to have been a power
glitch.  The SELECTED light on the disk went off and the console terminal
hung (this was not obvious at first).  Fixed, after assorted floundering,
powering off and on, etc., by powering the Decwriter off and on.

Then I tried the reboot again.  This time it got as far as a login message
on the console, although not elsewhere.  The system appeared to crash again.
The console was still live although the system was not responding.
Then the card reader (which had cards in it but had not been activated)
suddenly activated itself.  An instant later, the breaker on the power
circuit serving the cpu box went.  There were some odd symptoms when I
flipped the breaker back;  in particular, the cpu was flashing its DC
light, indicating power trouble.  Powered the box on and off, seemed
ok then.  Booting from the disk failed -- the disk returned ok status
but the block-0 boot clearly had not been read in properly.

Shut down the disk.  Disconnected the spare card reader (ideas may
take a while to penetrate my skull, but they get there eventually...).
Disk back up, rebooted just fine, left it that way.  The next card
reader experiment will be carried out with considerably more care at
a less busy hour.

I may have forgotten one or two details, but the above is about right.