tlug: Sparc boot

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

I did an Akihabara crawl today and bought some junk parts (some 30-pin
parity one meg SIMMs that I won't put in until after I know everything
else works; a gamble, but only 1300 yen for six of them.  If two are
bad, I still have 12 meg; if they're all good, I can get two more and
install that set of four and have 16 meg, and  a 340 meg SCSI drive
(small, but only 3500 yen and seems to work) and some new stuff (a Sun
mouse, an AUI transceiver, a Sun -> VGA adapter,  and a keyboard interface
adapter), so I've got everything I need to boot this 1+.

And it even boots.  That's the good news.  Turns out SunOS 4.1.1 is
installed on the other disk drive (one of the pair of 105 meggers that it
came with).

The strange part is that I never get a chance to tell it to boot from the
floppy.  I turn it on, it verifies that it has 8 memory installed, it
says I have a type 4 keyboard, it says I have boot PROM revision 1.3, then
it skips a couple of lines and the word "testing" appears on the screen.
I never see a > prompt (which I believe I should be getting, since the
boot PROM is below version 2).It won't take any keyboard input at this point, and after a while it goes
to boot from the disk drive with SunOS on it (interestingly, it does this
regardless of which of the two SCSI headers I attach it to, but perhaps
this is normal?).  

Next, it dumps lots of messages unfamiliar to a Sun newbie on
the screen, does see the 340 meg drive but doesn't like it (something to
the effect that it has a bad magic number and doesn't like the label), and
after some other messages roll by, it says it's rebooting again, then
starts the boot from SD0 over again.

Is something strange here, or am I just missing something really basic
that I'm supposed to do to get a boot prompt?

The SCSI IDs are currently set as follows, if this matters:

105 meg disk with SunOS on it: ID 3

340 meg disk with ??? on it: ID 1

Again, the system is finding the disk with SunOS and initiating a boot
from it without asking me or giving me a boot prompt to choose what i want
to boot.  So here I sit, all dressed up with a Red Hat Sparc 4.2 boot
floppy and no place to go :-)

On a side note, I love how easy it is to work on this Sparcstation.  I
wish Intel  hardware was this easy to install and remove stuff from.
Especially what must be the worst thing on most Intel boxes, installing
and removing the case cover (that's the real reason so many of us run with
the covers off our Intel machines all the time :-)   ).

Thanks in advance for any help you can give on this,

Jonathan

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