Replacing the cache memory battery on the AS/400 - a warning

["York, Albert" <albert.york@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In the last few months we have had several AS/400s which have needed the
battery replaced for the cache memory. Since the machines were all purchased
about the same time this is not surprising. Normally, the replacement
process is pretty straight forward and we have had few problems. However, I
would like to give everyone a heads up if they find they need to replace
one..

Make absolutely sure that you power down the system normally using the
PWRDWNSYS command before the battery is replaced. We had one CE who forced
the power down which meant that nothing that was in cache memory got written
to disk. He then replaced the battery which wiped out the memory. This is
causing us no end of trouble. We have dozens of damaged objects. Luckily,
most of them are logical files and we are able to rebuild them, but we have
also had to restore a couple physical files from tape. It looks like we
won't lose much data but it is causing a lot of work and downtime.

Albert York