Plexus help wanted

[William Thomas Daugustine]

On April 21, 1990, I aquired a Plexus P/35 for $80. When I brought it,
I asked if it was working. 'It was working four years ago, when it was
removed from service' is the answer I got. This thing has been sitting
in someones basement for four years! Theres minor disfigurment to the
case and such, but I dont think anything major was damaged. Looks like
water damage: theres some corrosion on the serial connectors, and the
boards are quite dirty. I havent found anything yet to clean the boards,
I tried FluxOff, but ran out of that fast! 

Anyways. The machine: 68000 12MHz CPU board, a RAM board banked with
156 64K DRAM chips (the closest I make it out is 1meg), a serial 
interface board (with room for about 16 ports), and a hard/tape drive
controller. I -think- this is a Multibuss-II or VMEbuss, but dont hold
me to it! It also has an 84meg 8" Fujistu SCSI drive, and a QIC-?? 
tape drive, standard size.

When I first powered it on, I was getting errors on the RAM board. Ive
talked with Motorola, who now support Plexus hardware, and was told
how to bypass the selftest failure to get to boot. I got into the
'primary boot' prompt, but thats about it... Pressing '?' gives me
a status listing of all the errors. Of course with no books or docs,
I cant decipher this. 

Pressing return will attempt to boot the hard drive. After a few seconds,
I get 'unable to wake disk controller' 'exit 10'. The tape drive seems
to be working, but intermittanly. An 'ls' command returns with a 'bad
tape read', of course since its a blank tape.

Does anyone have the same machine? If so, could you possibly send me
a bootable tape, and the file system so I can try to transfer it to
the hard drive? Id gladly reimburse you for the tape. Right now the
thing is a paper-weight, and Id really like to get it running, but
am in need of a system tape.

Many thanx for listening to my babbling!

Billy D'Augustine
Azog-Thoth at cup.portal.com
(201)989-8161