[weblacky]

Perhaps it’s your description of events but something doesn’t seem properly described.

Do you have L1 console output that suggests you have a dead battery? On that RTC? For that matter have you checked your yellow snaphat battery as well (much more likely to be dead). Does your L1 output during start suggest it’s defaulting and filling values after checksum errors or encountering bad values?

Otherwise, the reason I have trouble with this theory is, you claimed in your description that if you leave the Fuel off and then try to start it you have to cycle 5v power to get it to start.

Now I assume you meant this literally, like you have a running Fuel after your fiddling, you say shutdown in the PROM or Irix and it does so. Then you leave it alone and do not actually cut PSU AC power, so 5v standby has been feeding the RTCs all this time. Yet you still have power on issues on your next attempt?

The L1 RTC (for sure, not sure about snaphat, but likely the same) battery is for when the board doesn’t receive 5v. Which would only happen if you actually pulled AC wall power between system startups.

Please clarify startup testing procedures. Because while I could understand cycling to fill the NVRAM of a blanked RTC because of dead battery after loss of wall power. After successful boot, your RTC values are now filled out and running. Unless you’re pulling PSU standby power before every boot up attempt, your PSU should be feeding standby 5v to the RTCs to retain the newly booted NVRAM data which is valid after last successful startup and it should simply boot normally as long as you’ve not interrupted PSU wall power between power-on attempts.

You suggest in your description that this isn’t the case and that you need to cycle the connector on every boot-up attempt.

Please clarify if, after a successful boot, you can continue to restart and shutdown and start normally as long as you’ve not unplugged the PSU. Otherwise I think you have something else going on. As the RTC docs are clear about when battery is used. You can check incoming mainboard power at the RTCs to confirm RTCs are being externally feed retention/operating power between boot attempts.