Motorola PowerStack II specific notes(Under construction)

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The PowerStack II machines, of ca 1996 vintage, were the successors to the original PowerStacks. They are almost PC-like, except for the CPU, of course.
Bull sold a rebadged version, the Estrella 300.

In the early 2000's (or so) these PowerStack II boxes appeared en masse on the online flea market. I suspect these were relics from the Hessian state police's IT department. In the early 1990s they started a project (HEPOLAS (in German)) to computerize police work, initially on Motorola's 88K boxes. Due to the 88K's demise they had to switch to PowerStack/AIX soon after, and in the end the whole project was canned.

Pixx

front view rear view inside view

Notes

RAM

RAM module Original 32MB module

These machines seem to be a bit picky as far as additional RAM modules are concerned. Theoretically they support up to 4x128MB, but although the original modules look like those in the contemporary IBM RS/6000 43P's, I couldn't get any of the respective larger modules to work.
Working hypothesis: there's a slight difference between the larger RAM modules in the 43P-140 and the -240. Maybe I should try one of the latter?

NVRAM

When I added disk and CD-ROM, the boot console started to complain about "configuration checksum failed" (as opposed to the pristine machine, when this test passed). Moreover, the boxes seem to forget date and time.
So it looks like the NVRAM is non-functional. Unfortunately it is fed by one of these crappy timekeeper chips causing nothing but trouble when run empty, because they are directly soldered to the MoBo and are hard to find :-(
One of these beasts also seem to have leaked acid.
Last updated: 5-Apr-2012, M.Kraemer