I stopped to help out a buddy for about 2 hours today and left my parking lights on by mistake. I now have a catastophe on my hands and am lost in the diesel world!

When I got back into my truck, I hit the ignition and it wouldn't even turn over. So I got my buddy to jump me with his gas chevy tahoe.
**NOTE** I'm new to the diesels and so was he, so we connected the cables to the easiest battery to access (The passenger side battery).

It jumped my diesel right off. I pulled out of the parking lot and everything seemed fine. Til I looked down and noticed my tachometer, odometer, speedometer all were not working. The turn signals / 4 ways didn't work either. The ABS Light was on and the "Overdrive Off" Light was flashing on/off. It suddenly started shifting funny, (one hard time after it rev'd), and I had to put in 2nd gear and limp it home about 6 miles.


Also, The volts on the voltmeter (in dash) stayed low for the whole ride home and windows would barely go up even with truck running. I shut the truck off in front of the house, and turned to ON position to see, and volts were still low. I disconnected batteries from each other and checked each with DMM. Passenger side reads appx 11.97 VDC and Driver side read appx 10.96 VDC...which is real low I know. I forgot to check it while running. I have batteries hooked up to a slow charger now (individually).

This leads me to think I have a bad Alternator or Regulator or something for starters, but I'll get to that part later.

My major and priority concern is what the heck caused everything in my instrument cluster to not work? And what caused truck to suddenly crap out and not shift right. Can low volts cause stuff to go array? Or did my low volts and trying to start it fry something?
I've checked and found no blown fuses in the fuse panel (by left knee) and found no blown fuses in Power Distribution box under the hood (driver's side). Engine was running fine too.

I just hope I didn't fry a computer or wreck the tranny. This truck is a 97 but only has 81,000 original miles on it (used once a year to go on vacation)
The old man who had it before me who babied this truck and went too blind to drive it, so I got it cheap in great condition.

I've never pulled anything with it, just drive it to work every now and then.

Now I miss my little C1500 5.7L and how easy it was to work on..

 

Low voltage can cause weird things to happen. Charge the batteries, and have them load tested at a parts store. If the batteries are bad they may not take a charge while driving.

 

I have this same problem in my '95 F-350 7.3 deisel. Have you got yours working yet, if so what did you have to do. I do not have the low voltage problem though.