CompuServe Messages

Dean, When this problem first occured the only way I was able to get the machine to boot at all was to remove ALL of the expansion cards and boot with just the bare machine and chip ram. That worked OK, but then when I installed any one board the boot failure occured. I shut the machine down and came back to it the next day and was finally able to reinstall all the cards and it worked fine. Then the next day when I turned it on it wouldn't boot. I shut it off and turned it back on, then warm booted several times until finally it came up. Since then it seems that if the machine is off for at least 24 hours it won't boot up until it's been on for a few moments and I go through a series of warm boots or let it fail and reboot on its own until it comes up. However, today, after having been on for several hours, it started failing in midstream. I would warm boot OK, but then after several minutes or more it might fail. After shutting it off for an hour or so, it came back to life. I then shut it down, removed several cards and cleaned contacts, checked the GVP accelerator card's xtal, reinstalled everything and it's working OK right now. Given that it once only would boot up with chip ram installed, I doubt the problem is Megachip. I also ran mbrt several times and found no faults. I have quite a few cards installed. A GVP 3001, AmaxII Plus, Nexus controller/ memory, A2386 BB, VGA memory card, PC SCSI controller, and PC I/O card. I do note that when it fails to boot, the hard drive is never accessed. The power LED starts blinking (as it does on all failures I've had), the screen will blink and on occassion I will get a GURU software failure alert.