I was running X and the machine just froze up completely (no console or
network response.) I rebooted, ran fsck, and things look fine, so I
kept going. A little bit latter, I saw a brief flash of a SCSI error
message on the console, but the program I was running at the time cleared
the screen before I could really read it.
Before I could do much else, I received and error message about not being
able to access the SCSI devices, a failed SCSI reset, a whole string of
failed SCSI attempts, and then the machine froze again.
When I rebooted this time, MILO failed to access the SCSI devices at all.
I have two SCSI devices, an HP hard drive, and a NEC CD-ROM. I have
tested the machine with either or oth of the devices disconnected from the
SCSI controller, and tried out a different SCSI cable as well. In all
cases, when ever MILO tries to do a boot, ls, or run command, and begins
initializing the SCSI controller, it prints the following:
scsi-ncr53c7,8xx : at PCI bus 0, device 6, function 0
scsi-ncr53c7,8xx : NCR53c810 at memory 0x9000000, io 0x10000, irq 11
scsi0 : using io mapped access
Then freezes. I have removed all other cards and devices from the
machine; currently there is only a #9 GXE PCI card and the floppy drive
connected. I have tried with and without a hard drive connected to the
SCSI controller. I have set the boot block jumper to boot from floppy
and booted from a new copy of MILO 1.3.34 on floppy with the same
results. There have been no recent hardware additions or modifications
to the computer in the past week. The only major software addition has
been to install sendmail.
It looks like to me that I have a hardware problem with the motherboard,
but if any one can provide any suggestions or ideas for testing this,
I would really appreciate it. The only remaining thing I can think of
is to remove the PCI video card and connect something to the serial port
and boot and see if that is the problem, but it has been running fine for
weeks with the card before this, so it seems doubtful.
(Additionally, I have reseated the video card, the 2 16 meg SIMMs in
their sockets, made sure everything has a good connection, let the
machine sit powered off for several hours, and verified the power supply
and retested everything with the same result.)
I reallly hope it is not the motherboard... :/
Help...?
Thank you,
Kim Liu
bookwyrm@netcom.com