<div style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Using a "too new" M48T02/M48T08 will as well, though that does not seem to be the case here.</div><div style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br></div><div style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Thanks,</div><div style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Jonathan</div>
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On Thursday, November 20th, 2025 at 11:04, Patrick Finnegan via rescue <rescue@sunhelp.org> wrote:<br>
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<div dir="auto"><div><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 07:44 Mouse via rescue <<a href="mailto:rescue@sunhelp.org" rel="noreferrer nofollow noopener">rescue@sunhelp.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I've got a bunch of SLC and ELC boards, saved from back in the day,<br>
with a handful of the connector boards they plug into.<br>
<br>
I got them out recently because of the "SPARCstation 1 boot woes"<br>
thread. I found I had one MK48T02B, which of course had a long-dead<br>
battery. So I moved it from machine to machine. All worked, except of<br>
course that the dead battery meant it didn't retain anything over a<br>
power-off.<br>
<br>
Yesterday, I found two more ELC boards, so I tried to set them up.<br>
<br>
And I saw some very peculiar behaviour.<br>
<br>
With the NVRAM socket empty, the boards power up and go through<br>
selftest just fine - well, as fine as can be expected; they complain<br>
about the NVRAM not retaining data, but that's no surprise when there<br>
isn't any NVRAM there. They even boot diskfully, albeit with a<br>
00:00:00:00:00:00 MAC.<br>
<br>
But with the NVRAM in the socket? They don't print any of the selftest<br>
messages on power-up, not even the first few that they print even with<br>
no RAM installed. (I didn't wait long - several seconds - but the<br>
first messages are normally close enough to instant that at the human<br>
layer I can't see any delay.)<br>
<br>
So I tried the other boards, the ones that worked (with the same<br>
MK48T02B) before. Same syndrome.<br>
<br>
But pull the chip, and they go back to "working".<br>
<br>
Anyone have any idea what might be behind this?<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">A completely dead battery can cause this, along with an otherwise damaged nvram chip. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div data-smartmail="gmail_signature" dir="auto">Patrick Finnegan</div></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br>
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