Intermittant Bootup Failure: AT&T too much!

[Gil Kloepfer Jr.]

In article <1056 at ncar.ucar.edu> sitongia at hao.ucar.edu (Leonard Sitongia) writes:
|>With increasing frequency, my unixpc shows an intermittant problem in which
|>it wont boot.  The screen goes solid green (or bright green with a fine
|>black grid that makes it look like an array of small boxes, but not like
|>the line of small boxes at bootup).  Usually this is upon powering up the
|>box, but once it crashed with no messages and showed this symptom.
|>-Leonard E. Sitongia    System Programmer		 (303) 497-1509
|>SPAN:			NSFGW::"hao.ucar.edu!sitongia"	[NSFGW=9580]

This sounds an awful lot like something Lenny (you all know, lenny at icus)
told me about a long time ago (he's at the SysV.4 developer's conference,
so I'll answer for him) -- Seems that this is SOMETIMES a bad 68010 processor.
If you have access to a spare, or feel like going out and buying one, it's
cheaper than what AT&T wants for a new motherboard (might as well just
buy another 3B1 and use it for parts ;-).

A suggestion I can give is to make sure all the chips on the motherboard
are seated properly in their sockets, and carefully vacuum the dust off.
If it's anything like the inside of Lenny's 3B1, you'll need to replace
the vacuum cleaner bag when you're done (sorry Lenny :-)!!  In any event,
intermittents are generally caused by this, a chip going bad, or a broken
trace on the motherboard (forget it!).  Also check the solder connections
to the power supply connector.

---------
Gil Kloepfer, Jr.          U-Net: {decuac,boulder,talcott,sbcs}!icus!limbic!gil
ICUS Software Systems      Voice: (516) 968-6860 [H]   (516) 746-2350 x219 [W]
P.O. Box 1                 Internet:  gil at icus.islp.ny.us
Islip Terrace, NY  11752   "Life's a ...  well, you know..."