Sun dead battery / unresponsive openboot

[Jules Richardson]

On 05/03/2015 03:48 PM, Sean Caron wrote:
> I have seen almost anything once on Sun machines :O Are you testing with
> all cables disconnected just power and serial terminal? I have seriously
> seen a bad network cable cause mysterious hangs on a SS10 once...

Yeah, initially I just had serial and power hooked up, but because it seems 
to be defaulting to a network boot I did try connecting it up to my LAN 
too, but with no luck.

> You've tried some of the other usual troubleshooting stuff like swapping
> out/around some of the memory, removing Sbus cards, etc?

Not yet, but will do so.

I did just attack the PROM module with a dremel and so am now running with 
good battery voltage via an external battery (but at this stage it still 
throws up an "The IDPROM contents are invalid" message, of course)

I'm suddenly wondering if the serial port is fried. It's possible that I've 
only ever run this machine with keyboard/rodent/monitor attached, not via 
serial console, and a hardware fault on the rx side would explain the 
symptoms. I'll drag the necessary bits out of the basement and see if that 
changes anything (this room is rapidly filling up with vintage crap ;-)

cheers

Jules