Re: tlug: Sparc boot

[Sean Bennett <sean@example.com>]

Jonathan -

Tell me (us) more about your Sparc system - Is it a personal system? Were you able to aquire everything
used?  Are older Sun/Spark systems to be had fairly reasonably in Akihabara??  Do you plan on running SunOS
or Linux on it?

I'm still getting my unix feet wet on FreeBSD (no Linux in our office right now, and I haven't been able to
get down to Tokyo to pick up a Linux CD set; I'll have to bring my home system into the office to do an
install off of the web/T1 connection  I guess...). In our office, there's a small herd of SunOS and Solaris
systems behind me, but I haven't had the pleasure as of yet...

Sean
sean@example.com
Nnet Nakamura Shoji Co.
Morioka, Iwate



Jonathan Byrne wrote:

> 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
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> Next Nomikai: 17 July, 19:30 Tengu TokyoEkiMae 03-3275-3691
> Next Meeting: 8 August, Tokyo Station Yaesu central gate 12:30
> featuring Linux on multiple platforms:
> i386, Sparc, PA-Risc, Amiga, SGI, Alpha, PalmPilot, ...
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> Sponsor: PHT, makers of TurboLinux http://www.pht.co.jp



--------------------------------------------------------------
Next Nomikai: 17 July, 19:30 Tengu TokyoEkiMae 03-3275-3691
Next Meeting: 8 August, Tokyo Station Yaesu central gate 12:30
featuring Linux on multiple platforms:
i386, Sparc, PA-Risc, Amiga, SGI, Alpha, PalmPilot, ...
--------------------------------------------------------------
Sponsor: PHT, makers of TurboLinux http://www.pht.co.jp