SPARCClassic won't boot cdrom

David Brownlee abs at absd.org
Sun Aug 2 10:14:53 CDT 2015


On 2 August 2015 03:49:47 BST, Benjamin Huntsman <BHuntsman at mail2.cu-portland.edu> wrote:
>Hi all!
>I recently acquired a SPARCclassic, which is my first bit of Sun
>hardware.  Having an awful time getting it to boot from the CD-ROM.  I
>have tried a bunch of different terminators and several different
>cables, but whenever I try to boot I get this:
>
>ok boot cdrom -s
>Boot device: /iommu/sbus/espdma at 4,8400000/esp at 4,8800000/sd at 6,0:d  File
>and args: -s
>The SCSI bus is hung.  Perhaps an external device is turned off.
>
>Any ideas as to what might be wrong here?  The thing does not seem to
>send any commands to the CD-ROM, as the LED never comes on and I don't
>hear it doing anything...

There have probably been enough replies on the CD, so I thought it might be helpful to mention some other boot options :) 

If you have a SCSI disk and controller in another device you can dd an installed system into the disk. Last I checked qemu sparc worked quite well to install onto an image (or any number of people on the list could provide a suitable disk image) 

Sparcs also netboot well, you just need  rarpd and tftpd to get a the bootloader across, after which bootp and nfsd (or bootparamd if you are very old school :). Even if you get the CD working it's nice to keep a netboot setup around. 

Alternatively if the floppy drive has not expired you can boot from that... 

Once you have an OS loaded it gives another way to test the CD






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