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