A newly assembled MCA board I was bringing to life ( http:/tgi-sci.com/tgi/nmc3tops.gif ) had the LED on the RJ45 for "connection good" on without any cable plugged in. OK, a short between two neighbour pins, instantly located it, LED went off, plugged in the cable expecting the LED to go on as usual - nope. Looked around, well, nothing. Had not had any issues with this qfn (or whatever, dp83847 PHY the chip, may the inventor of that case be cursed forever) for years. Eventually unsoldered the chip, soldered it again, then again and the again - hopeless. Until I discovered I was plugging the wrong cable, a new one I had left on my desk which had two loose ends.... Wasted two days, what an idiot.
Then comes the HDD on the board, it just worked (sort of usual) with a minor intervention.
And then I put on it the new version (recently I made a script which puts together the latest version of the OS from all the directories it is spread over) and.... no boot. Old version - boot. New version - nope. Good thing I was in no hurry so I started to investigate, tracing the boot process - which I have had to do
2-3 times last 25+ years - took linking a version with a breakpoint at some early stage, after that it was easy. Found an uninitialized bit... a few months ago I changed the way the memory CAT (cluster allocation table) is locked and have forgotten to take care of this. It never bit me on 4 other devices I had installed this until today, some luck.... Someone please shoot me.Dimiter
====================================================== Dimiter Popoff, TGI