Locked out!

J.W.Emsley (J.W.Emsley@soton.ac.uk)
Tue, 14 Oct 1997 13:30:34 +0100 (BST)

Dear Colleagues,

We have managed to lock-up our Aspect 3000 computer on our MSL spectrometer,
and we cannot unlock the **** thing. Here is how it occurred.

One of my students assigned
a value of zero to SI when running DISMSL. The system frooze. Re-booting
came up with the message

"invalid data set in job 1"

The screen does not display a spectrum, i.e not even a baseline, just blank,
but with the usual prompt at the bottom of the screen. Giving a command,
such as PPE gives the message

"job active"

The system is not cleared by CNTRL K or CNTRL E or CNTRL Q.

Other commands such as DIR, for example, are active.
EP gives a distorted display of a spectrum

I decided to re-load the software from the 4 program diskettes with
the instruction

"COPY **.*=F1/=D1:Y"

Then ran

EXE INSTALL

And finally

RUN DISMSL

The system booted to the same state, that is still with "JOB ACTIVE".

I had the idea that the problem might be in a corrupt SPC1 file, and so
I copied SPC2 into SPC1 and re-booted, but to no effect.

Previous experience of problems with the Aspect suggested that turning
eveything off and going for a long coffee break would help. This time
this did not help.

So, does anyone know how to kill whatever activity is going on in job 1?

Jim Emsley