2gs with ramfast scsi fails to boot, just sits there

[jim@calico.litterbox.com (Jim)]

Hello.  Thought I'd pass this one along because I spent hours trying to 
dope out what was wrong.  

Symptoms:  intermittant boot failure on ramfast SCSI.  Machine just sits there
           if boot slot is set to 1, where the ramfast lives, otherwise 
           searches disks for boot disk and will boot from floppy.

Circumstances I'd just had my ramfast card die utterly and returned it to 
              Sequential, and was rewarded with a prompt replacement, no
              questions asked once I explained that no, I couldn't even get
              the Ramfast screen to come up.  I put in their new card, and
              first got a memory error on the ramfast card, then nothing 
              for an hour or two while I swapped cards, checked connectors 
              and so on.  Suddenly it started working again.  I shruged,
              wrote it up to gremlins, and proceeded to try to install
              GN/O.  Installation totally froze about halfway through.  
              Rebooted system, argh, no scsi card.

Solution:  By this time I was starting to suspect what turned out to be the 
           true cause of the problem - dirty contacts on the card edge 
           connector on the ramfast.  Once I polished these so they were
           bright (I'm told an erasor works well for this - I used a key
           *GENTLY* and brushed all the crud out from between the contacts) 
           the problems went away and stayed away.  Something to bear in 
           mind.  Corrosion happens.  Hope this helps someone.  :)



--
Jim Strickland
jim@calico.litterbox.com

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