Must just be my week for strange behaviour

[John Watlington]

On Feb 15, 2012, at 12:50 PM, Kevin Gordon wrote:

> I'm fixing up about 5 XO-1s I bought from eBay, all with what appear to be RTC issues.  
> 
> 4 all worked nicely, page fault error from the serial adapter console, entered the select/decimal/set-time, they rebooted and re-flashed very well.
> 
> Alas, number 5, when I crank up the power, all that appears on the serial console is a '+' sign, no pretty Forth message, no Page Fault error, just that lonely arithmetic symbol.
> 
> Went back to a couple of the others and verified that serial adapter and console still worked
> 
> Is there a possiblity that this one beast might have a different baud rate or parity?  I didn't really want to try the o, let's say, 32768 different combinations of values, if instead there is knowledge out there that this is a recognized issue that indicates an SPI explosion or sumpin'  :-)

That means that open firmware didn't get very far in the boot process.
I recommend reprogramming the firmware, but that is hard to do when
it is in this state...  Taking a known good SPI Flash from another board
would test whether this is the problem.

Cheers,
wad