11/44 not responding?

[harry]

It has been a couple of months since the 11/44 has been turned on, and it was then booting ok with the RL drives, and was responding to the console , Recently I thought it should be run again to check all was ok, Nothing has been disturbed, yet It will now only respond with a console message " CP didn't start" . I have varous manuals for the 11/44, But have found nothing to explain this message , or reasons for this error? can anyone help with this? or had this happen to their machine? If the front panel switch is moved across to Boot position, the console displays "(console Locked)" and prints "(console)" underneath on next line?? with the chevrons as usual on last line.

Harry

 

[AK6DN]

My suspicion is it means your 11/44 CPU is dead. The console on the 11/44 is run on an 8085 on the multifunction board. It takes a lot for it not to respond to the keyboard.

Does typing ^P to force halt the 11/44, and then I to init the CPU work? There is also the T command which will do a simple test on the CPU as a basic sanity check.

Last time I had my 11/44 go DOA it was an 82S100 PLA on the CONTROL board that went bad. Luckily I had a spare board for swapping.

 

[harry]

Thanks AK6DN, I have tried the console commands you mentioned ,and others such as E, D , S etc , But I get no responce from the cpu, nothing appears on screen using most of them, only the message "CP didn't start" The "T " Test command, only gives the chevrons on the next line, it used to print "console " (if the rom diags had passed,) I am not sure if the 8085 board is not talking to the cpu or the cpu is not reponding?
Unfortuneatly I don,t have a complete set of spare boards, First step maybe to remove the all boards and check and clean all connections I can with socketed components etc, and then swap out what boards I have, I was hoping to identify what was actually meant by " Cp didn.t Start" to try and narrow the problem .

Harry

 

[AK6DN]

"CP didn't start" just indicates that the 8085 attempted to start the 11/44 CPU and the 8085 could not detect that the CPU is running.
There could be a myriad of problems that cause this response, but most likely is that the 8085 and console subsystem is fine and your 11/44 CPU is hosed.