Re: Battery Cache

I've seen really weird stuff happen with twinax. On something so simple as having the black and white reversed in your power outlet and then compound that by using your household brown extension cable between it and the twinax terminal can give you a shock when you try to twist on the twinax. We had great fun with that in the office! "Want to advance and learn computers? Try this...". (Google BOFH). Perhaps your power situation blew back into your twinax port on your box? You may have your 270 on one of those power strips guaranteed to replace any hardware that got damaged but if your spike came through a twinax terminal not so protected...
On another occasion I've seen ports on a S/36 just go bad. Evidently that happened often enough that IBM suggested putting an alternate console on port 6 address 0 (or some such thing).
Ok, I hate twinax.

Larry's right, the cache should already be flushed. You can verify that with STRSST
1. Start a service tool 7. Hardware service manager
9. Work with resources containing cache battery packs 5=Display battery information Battery state should be in an error condition. If not, then use 2=Force battery pack into error state

When our CE comes in because "Time to warning" is between this, and the next downtime. He does that. The last time we replaced the battery without bringing down the system. He put it into error state, waited a few minutes until "Battery pack can be safely replaced" changed to yes. Then he popped out the battery without even removing card or opening anything up on the frame. These newer cards have a port in the back to do such a thing.

There you go, get a newer card to not only increase cache performance but to reduce downtime. Probably not a concern for the home hobbyist but others may be reading this.

Rob Berendt