UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Hi all,
I've got a Sun ultra 30 workstation. the Nvram battery died so I replaced it. I reprogrammed the mac address using the mlpl command all that so it booted without error. But for some reason I was trying to boot via the network. So I did a STOP A and boot disk1 which is the alias for my SCSI hard disk. It worked a few times but now when I turn it on it all fires up and everything seems fine but I get no video on my monitor. This happened a few times and I pressed random keys and it seemed to boot. I don't think its a hardware fault? Any ideas ?

Thanks,
Rob

I reckon your NVRAM contents are still screwed and the console output is being redirected somewhere (probably to the first serial port).

If you can't get to the OBP to change this then the only option is to hold down STOP-N as it boots (you might need to do that a few times) to reset all the NVRAM to default. Unfortunately this means re-doing the setup that you've already done.

If that doesn't work then it is probably a hardware fault.

Hope that helps.

I don't know about the Ultra-30 but maybe it should be

Code:

output-device=screen
input-device=keyboard

That you can set on the firmware prompt with

Code:

setenv output-device screen
setenv input-device keyboard

Perhaps you have an exotic or too new graphics hardware that is not recognized by the firmware? Then an update of the openboot firmware might help.