Still working to test the interface to the card reader; P390 server partially boots OS/2 and stalls

 TESTING THE INTERNAL INTERFACE BOARD TO THE DOCUMATION M1000

I reinstalled the board where I built Brian Knittels microcontroller based interface, housed inside the card cage of the card reader. The interface connected well with a terminal program and with the cardread.exe program written by Brian. It appeared to show the status correctly - hopper empty and EOF pressed would show up on the PC application as appropriate.

When I tried to read a card, having pushed the EOF button and seen the status reflected properly in the program, the program ignored EOF and left a pick pending after the card was finished. I put in multiple cards but was unable to get it to stop with an EOF and unable to have it save the card contents in the PC file. There is an option to display the last card read but that remained blank.

NEXT STEPS TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IS HAPPENING

It could be that the interface controller board is not reacting properly to the IM pulses nor saving the data - thinking it has asked to read one card and never getting the data back to the cardread.exe program. I am not sure what is occuring on the link. I can use a terminal program like PUTTY to see the status character but it doesn't work well for the binary format data that is sent back for each card column since it interprets them as ASCII characters. 

I will whip up a Python program to connect to the interface and read a card. The interface uses a very simple protocol, sending one ASCII character as a command and receiving an ASCII character with status. When a card is read (response to a P command) there will be 160 bytes of binary information then on ASCII status character. This should be a breeze to examine with my program to see what is transpiring on the link between PC and interface.

It may be that the program is onboard the interface PCB - I can set up the logic analyzer to verify that the various chips are seeing the signals coming from the card reader and where if anywhere things break down. That is another test I can do.

DESIGNING REPLACEMENT INTERFACE USING ARDUINO MEGA2560

In the meantime, I have sketched out a simple implementation with an Arduino Mega2560 that will replace the interface board but conform to the protocol used by Brian's cardread.exe program. I will bang out the code, wire it up as an alternate connection to the reader and test it out at a later date.

FINISHED INSTALLING PCI CARDS AND RAID DISK DRIVES INTO x235 SERVER

After I replaced the CMOS battery and verified that the server gets through all its BIOS initialization without errors, I finished up the installation by putting in the P390 card, RAID card, SCSI card and LAN cards to the slots where I found them. I then slid all six disk drives into the front bays.

RUNNING DIAGNOSTICS ON SERVER

I fired up the diagnostics that are built into the server, exercising everything except communications. All looked great. I won't know about the PCI boards until later but the core of the server seems undamaged. I believe there are good diagnostics for the P390 board that I can run from OS/2 once I have the server OS fully operational.

ATTEMPTING TO BOOT OS/2 BUT HANGS PARTWAY

When I let it boot, it found a hidden OS/2 partition for reinstallation, a production OS/2 partition and one called New OS/2. I tried to boot the 'production' one but it stopped on a splash screen for some communications program and never proceeded. 

I tried rebooting and hitting the F2 key to drop OS/2 into command line, but it froze on the same splash screen before I saw a command prompt. 

Some possibilities:

1. The "new OS/2" is the correct partition to boot
2. Some configurations were lost due to the CMOS battery dying and need to be recreated
3. Something is broken in one of the PCI cards being accessed by OS/2 at boot time
4. Some other damage was done not otherwise specified

I am woefully ignorant of OS/2 but I will need to collect some documentation and figure out how to debug the bootup (unless the New OS/2 partition magically works). That will be my homework for now.