Recently, I've been having a little problem with my SX164, and I was
curious if anyone could help me out. Here's what's going on...
I had my computer running for a week or so, then I powered down when I
left for a weekend trip. Coming back, I hit the power button and was
greeted by the normal whirring of my hard drives and fans, but the MB
beeped 5 times, which the manual says is because there is no memory
present. So I unplug everything from the back and pull the cover off to
see if there's something like a screwdriver or rat or something crazy
like that that snuck into the case over the weekend. Nothing like that.
So I plug in the bare essentials and turn it on, and it gets past the
diagnostics. Needless to say I'm confused. So I turn it off and plug
stuff like my palm pilot cradle and network cable back in. 5 beeps. OK.
Unplug network. successful boot. So I shrug my shoulders and plug the
network cable back in before the network startup part of the linux boot
script runs. Now I start getting weird errors from eth0. They disappear
when I unplug the network cable again. I shutdown, pull the NIC out, and
put it in a different PCI slot, plug in the network, and it boots fine.
So I leave it on for about a month. Then I shut it down overnight cause
I want to start only having it on when I'm home to try to drop my
electric bill some.
So now I go to turn it on, and it beeps 5 times. Remembering the last
time this happened, I unplug the net connection, and it boots. I get all
sorts of errors on one of my disks and it's making this really horrid
clunking noise, so I shut it down and decide to try again later. Later
comes, and no amount of unplugging devices or pulling cards helps. I
haven't checked the RAM to see if it's allright yet, but since I got it
to boot by unplugging the network cable, I figure that the RAM is OK.
Needless to say, when the RAM is not in the machine, it beeps 5 times
also. So it's not some sort of inverse RAM voodoo that's happening.
So my question is: what do the expert Alpha owners and users on this
list think my problem is? Power supply? Motherboard? RAM? Chickens?
I can send more details about my system later, but I don't have them
with me right now and don't remember all the particulars. Here's what I
do remember:
o DEC NIC that uses tulip driver
o NCR SCSI card, don't remember which
+ 2 x 4 GB SCSI drives -- one's Fujitsu and probably has some sort of
problem that locks up my SCSI bus; the other's Seagate
o SB 16 (a really old card)
o SX 164, 533MHz
o Number 9 SVGA card.
Any help or advice is most appreciated.
Thanks,
Matt
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