14 May
2004
14 May
'04
2:13 p.m.
At 08:08 PM 5/14/04 -0500, you wrote:
Hi Gang,
Recently acquired an old Sun SPARCstation-1.
It boots! - but I don't know the root password - Guy who gave it do me
did so because he was moving, and I can't locate him now.
Got Solaris 2.6 CD/docs with it, so I figured I'd just reinstall a
fresh system.
Can't get it to boot from CD.
When I power on the system, hit STOP-A to get to the boot prompt,
then do:
boot sd(0,6,2)
It thinks a while, then I see one access to the CD, and I get the message:
(From memory so not exact quote but pretty close):
"The magic character in the label is incorrect. The file loaded, but it
does not appear to be executable".
Tried everything I can think of, but this is the only response I am able
to get which involves any CD activity at all.
Same procedure works perfectly on a Sparc-2 - boots right up off the CD.
I'm assuming that this CD works on the Sparc-1, because A) it came from the
same source at the same time (not a guarantee), and B) It's GOT Solaris 2.6
already booting on it (I just can't login) - I'm guessing that it was
installed from this CD.
Also tried a Solaris 2.7 CD that I have onhand - exactly the same result.
Anyone have any insight to offer?
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.
Joe
Regards,
Dave Dunfield
--
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