15 May
2004
15 May
'04
12:59 p.m.
Hi Joe,
>Recently acquired an old Sun SPARCstation-1.
>Can't get it to boot from CD.
A lot of the older SGIs and Suns required that the CD
drive DEFAULT to
512 bytes/block or else they won't work. The newer systems issue a SCSI
command to the drive to set it to 512 bytes/block but the older ones didn't
issue the command and if the drive didn't default to that then you wouldn't
work. On some drives like the Toshiba 3401s you could change the jumpers
to control the number of bytes/block that it defaulted to. Just a quess
but I could be completely wrong.
Thanks! That was exactly the problem. Dug around in my parts and found a
Toshiba 3401 and cut the required traces to make it default to 512 byte
blocks, and the machine booted right up - installing from the CD as I
type (and it looks like it going to take a while....)
Regards,
Dave
--
dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Vintage computing equipment collector.
http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html