Thanks to all the (approx a dozen!) folks who responded on this. It indeed
turned out to be the keyboard. Swapped it with another machine and it
rebooted. Meanwhile the original keyboard was so messed up you couldn't
even type half the letters. Hmmmm, one is almost tempted to think that
beverages might be reponsible!
Thanks again!
Chris
Original message follows:
Hi Guys,
I have a strange one here. Someone kicked the power supply to an Ultra-5
and knocked it off. When I restored power the machine attempted to boot
as normal, got as far as the spinner then printed out a load of control
characters and sat there alternately flashing the screen white then
black, thus:
SunOS Realease 5.7 Version Generic_106541-08 [UNIX(R) System V Release 4.0]
Copyright (c) 1983-1999, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z
^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z^[[249z
^[[249z^[[249z
(and then a slow flashing screen)
Aha, I thought, something up with the boot disk, so boot it off a CD.
Except it did exactly the same thing with the CD! Presumably there is a
hardware problem? Has anyone seen this before and can shed a little light
on the mystery?
-- Dr Chris Stoddart: Unix SysAdmin, Department of Computer Science, Sheffield University, U.K.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:14:09 CDT