I turn my back for just a moment and something goes wrong with the Alpha OpenVMS. Actually, it is my fault. I should not have given the system password out. Or maybe the room where the system terminal sits should be under lock and key. Anyway, the system is locked up. THere is a generic sort of prompt asking the user to accept default settings with a [YES] at the end. But no matter what key stroke or combination of keyboard entries (including F1) is typed, the system does not budge beyond this point. I cannot imagine that this program is system critical. And so, I don't think there is any problem with stopping the program. But I have run out of ideas on how to do this. Incidently, the floppy drive as a little LCD light that is on. It is as if the Alpha is waiting to get input from that drive. If I turn off the coputer and restart it, what is the procedure to do so? none

Now things are REALLY a mess. They were a bit of a mess before but now they are just about as broken as they can be. Here is what I did and what was done... On a seperate terminal logged on as System: $ sho device opa0/full Terminal OPA0:, device type unknown, is online, enabled as operator terminal, record-oriented device, carriage control, device is busy. Error count 0 Operations completed 15644 Owner process "SYSTEM" Owner UIC [SYSTEM] Owner process ID 000005F7 Dev Prot S:RWPL,O:RWPL,G,W Reference count 4 Default buffer size 80 $ Using the Owner process ID, 000005F7, I entered $ show process/id=000005F7/continuous and I got a running loop showing this: Process SYSTEM 15:35:31 State LEF Working set 314 Cur/base priority 9/4 Virtual pages 10624 Current PC 800DB940 CPU time 0 00:00:20.48 Current PSL 0000001B Direct I/O 40719 Current user SP 7AF2A0A0 Buffered I/O 6517 PID 000005F7 Page faults 1411 UIC [SYSTEM] Event flags E6000003 40000000 AS800$DKA0:[SYS0.SYSCOMMON.][SYSEXE]PCSI$MAIN.EXE;1 I was able to stop this process: $ stop/identification=000005f7 $ sho process/id=000005f7/continuous %SYSTEM-W-NONEXPR, nonexistent process $ Then, I went over to the system terminal and I noticed that it was still locked up. So I restarted the system. Now I have a new problem. The system seemed to have started alright apart from the fact that the system login does not seem to recognise some entries in a login.com file (but this is unrelated ... I think). But all logins remotely get an error. Anyone who tries to start a new connection gets a time-out message. And the session I was using remotely now says: Network error: Software caused connection abort What do I do now?

Bill, Generally, an OpenVMS system can generally be recovered from almost any problem. I have done such recoveries many times for clients, and OpenVMS has the rare quality of being recoverable from almost any failure. It does, however, require care. It would appear that someone was in the process of installing software (PCSI$MAIN) when the terminal session "froze". Your posting did not include any specific details, so it is difficult to identify exactly what was being installed. - Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com