Without power it is impossible to use the front display panel, it does not have any power either. We also do not have a maintenance contract on the machine any longer as it is being surplussed.

Sorry, are you saying there is no power connection?

to reiterate –
1) Connect to power – go have a 3 course lunch
2) return hours later, press ‘power on’
3) Await results via a connected console

If it’s scrap and not on maintenance, do you care? If ‘management’ don’t want trheir data go walkabout in the world from the scrapyard then they’ll have to pay IBM to come and fix it.

BUT
If this is a potential for you to take home and nurture, then it’s important – we need to find a solution.

If it is really really old, best examine it internally for battery degradation.

- make friends with an engineer –

and start reading the manuals – the engineering manuals may be on line somewhere in the ibm.com site.

We had an old model 840 3 years ago and the internal battery had to be replaced. Here is the link we used to detemine the part number from IBM:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v5r3/index.jsp?topic=/rzar5/rzar5batry.htm
We fortunately had maintenance for IBM to swap out. It took the CE a few minutes to replace so it must not be too difficult, hopefully you can find the service manual somewhere on IBM’s website.

This machine has Protected Health Information that is required by federal law to remain confidential… surely you have heard of HIPAA?

If we cannot find a way to jump-start the batteries

we will have to destroy the disk drives. We are a state agency and there is also laws about what we do with all equipment so it will most likely go to another state agency or at least they get the first option to grab it. It will certainly be less useful w/o the disk drives but we may have to do that.

Quite a little dilemma.

I guess the question is do you need to retrieve the data? If not, then pull the drives and destroy them. There are companies that will shred drives – and there are a variety of other ways to erase the data. I work for the US Department of Justice – we have specific proceedures to follow when “excessing” computer hardware – which includes sanitizing the drives – unfortunately, we have no specific written proceedures for AS/400 drives. (All the proceedures we have are written around Windoze)

If you need to retrieve the data you may need to pay someone – or you can do as Yorkshireman suggests and just plug it in and wait a bit – OR – get inventive. Disconnect the batteries – mark the cables and battery terminals first so you know how to reconnect it all. Get a car battery charger and charge the suckers up. Carefully connect it all and see if it works. If it doesn’t work, you haven’t lost anything but some time.

Good luck.
regards
Mike

Well, the powers that be decided that we would just remoive the disk drives and destroy them, which we have completed. Ther actual cabinet was mived to the warehouse for surplus items and they dripped it off of the truck… needless to say, the machine is now toast so this discussion may be terminated! Thanks to all for your advise and suggestions but dropping the dang thing sure worked!