Sun SPARCstation LX boot from CDROM?

[Alan Perry]

My collection is primarily sun4c and sun4m machines. I have been having problems with the CD drives that I have been acquiring (purchase or rescue) in the last year or so. 4-5 drives, none worked. It has all been drives in 411 cases or going into them, no failures with internal drives. Haven’t investigated why.

> On Aug 28, 2020, at 14:22, Tom Hunter via cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> About 20 years ago I rescued a fully working Sun SPARCstation LX with CDROM
> and QIC-150 tape drive - all 3 in lunchbox format - plus monitor when we
> moved office and management decided they no longer wanted/needed it.
> 
> Shortly after I have installed an early version of NetBSD (1.3.3) from the
> CDROM drive. I played with it for a few days and then stored the entire
> system in a museum grade glass display cabinet. This is indoors with
> minimal dust and benign temperatures between 18 degrees C to about 28
> degrees C (typical room temperatures here in Perth in Western Australia
> unless you run the air conditioner).
> 
> 
> 
> Now retired I took the stack of "lunch-boxes" and the CRT monitor out of
> the display cabinet and powered it up. After 20 years no smoke came out but
> the system didn't boot but reported trouble with the NVRAM setting. I still
> could start NetBSD using a "boot disk" command. I googled the problem and
> bought and installed a replacement TIMEKEEPER chip (M48T08-100). After
> defaulting the settings and setting the MAC address and machine ID it was
> happy and booted from disk without intervention. In NetBSD I then set the
> date and time and all was good.
> 
> 
> 
> Then I decided to upgrade to the latest version of the SPARC version of
> NetBSD 9.0. I downloaded and burned the ISO image to CD. Dropped it into a
> CD caddy and inserted it into the CDROM drive (SUN Model 411 - really a
> Sony CDU-8012 3.1e). I did a "probe-scsi-all" and it found both the hard
> drive and the CDROM (target 6 unit 0).
> 
> 
> 
> Now comes the problem - if it try to run from it via "boot cdrom" it
> doesn't even access the CDROM drive - the LED doesn't turn on unlike when
> you do the "probe-scsi-all".
> 
> 
> 
> The "cdrom" alias is really: "/iommu/sbus/espdma at 4,8400000/esp at 4
> ,8800000/sd at 6,0:d".
> 
> 
> 
> The "disk" alias is really: "/iommu/sbus/espdma at 4,8400000/esp at 4,8800000/sd at 3,0"
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The "@3" versus the "@6" are the SCSI IDs of the disk drive versus the
> CDROM. I don't know what the trailing bits mean. I tried cdrom aliases from
> "sd at 6,0:0" to "sd at 6,0:f" and all report:
> 
> 
> 
> Can't read disk label
> 
> Can't open disk label package
> 
> Can't open boot device
> 
> 
> 
> The LED doesn't blink even once unless I remove and re-insert the caddy
> with the CDROM media or if I do a "probe-scsi" or "probe-scsi-all".
> 
> 
> 
> I tried original Sun Solaris 2.4 installation media with the exact same
> result/symptoms.
> 
> 
> 
> I also tried to access the CDROM from NetBSD using "cat /dev/cd0a" but the
> drive's LED didn't blink and I got an obscure error message.
> 
> 
> 
> The Boot ROM revision is reported as 2.9. The system was bought about 1985
> or 1986 and has seen very little use.
> 
> 
> 
> I searched google without success. Maybe I used the wrong search terms or
> the equipment is just getting too old and FAQs have disappeared.
> 
> 
> 
> What would cause the CDROM boot problem?
> 
> 
> 
> There is a chance that the actual Sony drive died. I partially disassembled
> it hoping to find dust stuck on the LASER optics but it was nice and clean.
> The positioning and ejection mechanisms work just fine. The whole system
> was working before I put it into my relatively dust proof glass display
> cabinet.
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks and best regards
> 
> Tom Hunter