The test harness failed before the BIOS did
Sunday morning was the big confirmation run for M17 on the PB686, running from the One ROMs. The list was short: a stack of cold boots, a stack of warm boots, my test program, then some boots with HIMEM loaded. Claude runs these sessions on its own now, power cycling included, and it wrote the script that drives them.
The first two attempts stopped, and both times the PB686 was fine. It was the test script that needed a lie down. The first one was waiting for a line my startup files never print. The second one asked the right question and then read the answer off the wrong line. Every boot in both attempts was actually clean.
Before the third try, every check in the script had to prove it could both pass on a good capture and fail on a doctored one, and the script had to recognise a known E1 crash when it saw one. The third run passed everything it could do without me at the keyboard.
Two footnotes. The warm boots were faked in software, so nobody actually pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del. And the earlier run that same morning, on the same build, did hit E1 once in twenty HIMEM boots, and once more on the recovery boot straight after. Windows 3.1 and the drive A: test are still waiting for me to sit down at the keyboard.
