Compaq XP1000 Alpha Professional Workstation - Console is secure.

[SteveHere]

Hi All,

I have a "New to me" Compaq XP1000 workstation. I think this is the newer version of the hardware that can't run Windows NT, but I can't do anything at the SRM prompt, even the help command gives me:
Console is secure. Please login.

I've tried login with the obvious, nothing, password, Password, Compaq, Administrator, etc. etc with no luck. Also tried the numbers I can find on bar codes and asset tags on the machine, also no luck so far.

I've read through a few of the documents I can find online, including the installation and setup and also the troubleshooting guide, but I can't figure out if there's a procedure or a jumper that would allow me to factory reset the settings or at least the password?

Can any of the folks out there with experience with the DEC / Compaq Alpha hardware platform let me know if there's a solution?

Thanks!

 

[nadaveiron]

Have you tried the procedure described for the DS10 series (page 80 here)? It may work, as they're roughly contemporaries.

 

[Terri Kennedy]

Hi All,

I have a "New to me" Compaq XP1000 workstation. I think this is the newer version of the hardware that can't run Windows NT, but I can't do anything at the SRM prompt, even the help command gives me:
Console is secure. Please login.

I've tried login with the obvious, nothing, password, Password, Compaq, Administrator, etc. etc with no luck. Also tried the numbers I can find on bar codes and asset tags on the machine, also no luck so far.

I've read through a few of the documents I can find online, including the installation and setup and also the troubleshooting guide, but I can't figure out if there's a procedure or a jumper that would allow me to factory reset the settings or at least the password?

Can any of the folks out there with experience with the DEC / Compaq Alpha hardware platform let me know if there's a solution?

Thanks!

Is that one of the EISA ones? Normally my suggestion is to just pull the battery, but if it is EISA you'd probably lose the config and without the EISA diskette(s) you'd be up a creek.

 

[SteveHere]

Have you tried the procedure described for the DS10 series (page 80 here)? It may work, as they're roughly contemporaries.

Thanks nadaveiron, looking in similar manuals from the same era is a good idea. I did try your suggestion but unfortunately, this hardware doesn't have a Halt button on the front panel, and when I try the rmc command I get "No such command".

I tried looking at some of the other computers in the "Professional Workstation" line from the same time period, but these are PCs. The AP550 has a clear cmos jumper, but I can't find one in this Alpha, at least not one that's labelled.

Is that one of the EISA ones? Normally my suggestion is to just pull the battery

Thanks Terri, no this is a PCI machine. I did try removing the CMOS battery and unplugging it, too. Will try that again overnight, but I'm not hopeful that this will do the trick since I think the machine has been out of service for many years and still has a password.

I've read other places that there does not appear to be a technical manual for this model number online. I have spent a bit of time looking, but if anyone is aware of one, please let me know. There are unlabeled jumpers and a couple of banks of DIP switches that are unlabelled but without documentation or some guidance I won't be trying those.

 

[reinhardtjh]

I zipped up all the documentation I had on the XP1000 and loaded it to DropBox. Download it here. I also attached it to this post. Hopefully one will work.

I found one spot that may help. In the Tech Design document there is a picture of the main board showing the NVR reset jumpers. If you do that it may reset the password. Other than that I found no mention at all of any firmware/bios or main board password protection.

 

[SteveHere]

zipped up all the documentation I had on the XP1000 and loaded it to DropBox. Download it here. I also attached it to this post. Hopefully one will work.

I found one spot that may help. In the Tech Design document there is a picture of the main board showing the NVR reset jumpers. If you do that it may reset the password. Other than that I found no mention at all of any firmware/bios or main board password protection.

Thanks reinhardtjh for that. The jumper J28 is labelled on the silkscreen, I had tried it for a few minutes, but left it overnight last night. It causes the system to boot to the Serial console instead of VGA, but when I connect there the dreaded "Console is secure. Please login." message still appears, so this jumper isn't clearing the needed password area of the NVRAM.

The Service Guide HTML file was great, thanks for that! Unfortunalty, I can find no mention on the procedure for resetting the password in this document.

Following up on nadeveiron's idea of finding documentation from the period, there is a link to a document up on Archive.org that is labelled wrong, but still does have some interesting information, it is the ALPHA Firmware Update Seminar from 2002. This does contain some mention of the XP1000, but sadly the section on reseting lost passwords covers only a few of the machines, and not the XP1000. But this section does have me worried, since there appears to be 3 options, some machines can be reset using the halt button (I've already tried a couple variations of this, turns out there is a halt / reset button on the front panel of this machine), some can be reset by loading a special program onto a floppy disk, and at least one of the systems says to get a replacement mainboard.

So, next action for me on this project will be to go scouring old Compaq FTP sites and looking for a password reset utility for the XP1000.

If anyone else has more documentation or ideas, please let me know?

 

[reinhardtjh]

Sorry that didn't work!

Can you post a screen shot of the display you get?
When it comes up in the serial console are you able to do any commands?

 

[Bitly]

It's likely the passwords are stored in the BIOS memory instead of NVRAM. Look around the motherboard and see if you can find the BIOS memory. It might be a small 8-pin SPI EEPROM.

If it's an SPI EEPROM you can use a Bus Pirate to log traffic from the part while attempting to log in and see if the password appears.

CW

 

[SteveHere]

Sorry that didn't work!

Can you post a screen shot of the display you get?
When it comes up in the serial console are you able to do any commands?

No problem, appreciate all the help. I'll do one better than a photo, here's a short video I made today showing the boot process and the messages along the way...

The behavior on the serial console is the same, can't really do any commands even the ones related to firmware updates like trying to boot off the floppy.

It's likely the passwords are stored in the BIOS memory instead of NVRAM. Look around the motherboard and see if you can find the BIOS memory. It might be a small 8-pin SPI EEPROM.

If it's an SPI EEPROM you can use a Bus Pirate to log traffic from the part while attempting to log in and see if the password appears.

Thanks for the suggestion, CW. I've made a note, it's time I take the machine completely apart to get a look at the backplane. I believe I've already read somewhere that the password is stored on the backplane and not the CPU daughter card.

I'm going on a trip tomorrow so this project may be on hold for a week. In the meantime if anyone has additional information, it would be much appreciated.

 

[SteveHere]

Project Update: At the end of last year as I was purging dormant projects and doing some housekeeping I realized that the saved search I'd been running on eBay for this project was setup wrong, I'd made a silly typo, XP10000 instead of XP1000. When I corrected that saved search, voila, there was an XP1000 main board out there on eBay. I waited a while to see if the price was going down, but it was not so I made an offer which was accepted.

The part arrived today. I tested the machine to make sure it was still in the same condition from July and it was behaving the same way. I installed the new main board and that appears to have resolved the issue! I was able to use the SRM console and get OpenVMS Installed on the machine.

I'll package up the old main board and keep it, at some point I may come back to the reverse engineering efforts that were outlined here, and that should be significantly easier with a known good working system.

But for now, the system runs great and I just need to decide what OS to run on it, I had some OpenVMS Media from a couple of years ago before the Alpha program ended but I'm disappointed they ended that program so I may just end up trying to get Debian installed.