VAX questions (3100/76)

[Saquinn624 at aol.com]

Thanks for everyone's help in the past- adamg helped me get my Apollo running 
and Dwight Elvey gave me more info on the Polymorphic Card (don't have a kbd 
yet- nor any firmware so that project is on hold for a while). The S-100 
manpage is great-the only manuals I couldn't find were the IDS modem and the 
Digital Systems 8" floppy.

Now I'm trying to get my first VAX up, and it's having SCSI issues.
(VS3100/76, 32MB, no GFX option, no kbd/mouse, no drives,10bT tranceiver

With the cable plugged in (no devices), bus A fails with FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF 
FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFF03 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF.
If you take off the cable from the KA43, it passes the test. Presence or 
absence of the terminator on the bus makes no difference. 
If it were not for the fact that it works without the cable, I would assume 
that the system board was dead, and probably toss it (it doesn't look easy to 
replace the 5380s) but I don't want a VAX to die unnecessarily, and I'm not 
sure where to go from here as far as troubleshooting.
When I got it, the SCSI cable was unplugged so it might have been yanked on 
before someone realized there were clips, but it doesn't appear obviously 
damaged.

Does anybody know how Digital marketing explained the 68-pin SCSI and MMJ as 
improvements, or did they even try?

-Scott Quinn