Booting a Sparcstation 5 with dead HD


 
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# 1  
Old 11-30-2010
Error Booting a Sparcstation 5 with dead HD

We have an ancient Sparcstation 5 for those few clients that still run SunOS or Solaris. After the last power outage (4 years ago?) we never turned it back on. It had been making some unpleasant noises back then, too.

Now we need it again and it won't boot.

The machine came with one hard drive and SunOS. We bought an additional HD and put Solaris on it. The bottom drive is SunOS and the top one is for Solaris. We've deduced that the original ( SunOS, bottom) drive has failed -- when it is in the bottom bay we get a notice
Code:
The SCSI bus is hung. Perhaps an external device is turned off

upon powerup and the machine hangskeyboard does nothing). We also hear a sad whine, dropping in pitch, every few seconds (like maybe the HD is trying to spin up, fails, and then spins down). The whine is still there if we switch the drives around, but we don't get the "SCSI bus hung" notice.

We took out that hard drive and only left the Solaris drive in there (on the bottom). Now when we boot, before we can type anything we get
Code:
Boot device: /iommu/sbus/espdma/esp/sd@3,0:a  File and args: cprboot
root on /iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,1001000/espdma@5,8400000/esp@5,8800000/sd@3,0: a fstype 4.2
Boot: cprboot
Boot:  lookuppn failed: No such file or directory (errno 2)
copen: bad vn_open
boot failed

This is strange to us since in the past we had to type boot disk2 or boot disk3 at the ok prompt.

We really only need to boot into Solaris. Is there some way of changing the drive so we can boot off it? Change the SCSI id?
# 2  
Old 12-01-2010
SPARC's aren't my area of expertise but "SCSI" starts some warning bells ringing in my head.

Did you check the SCSI ID's? What is the new disk's SCSI ID, and what was the old one's? The number likely has a direct relationship with the device the disk appears as, it's a pretty fundamental thing like master/slave jumpers in old IDE...

What kind of SCSI bus is it? Is it self-terminating? The old disk might have had built-in terminators.
# 3  
Old 12-01-2010
Not a SCSI issue

Quote:
Originally Posted by Corona688
SPARC's aren't my area of expertise but "SCSI" starts some warning bells ringing in my head.

Did you check the SCSI ID's? SCSI ID's are hardwired/jumpered sort of like an old IDE disk's master/slave, but it's a number from 0 to 7 instead of on/off. The number likely has a direct relationship with the device the disk appears as. What is the new disk's SCSI ID, and what was the old one's?

What kind of SCSI bus is it? Is it self-terminating?
SPARCs have a weird internal SCSI bus -- they automatically take care of both termination and SCSI IDs. The drive's SCSI ID must be set to 0 and the effective SCSI ID is determined by which bay the drive is in.
# 4  
Old 12-01-2010
Seperate controller for each card? Wow. SCSI still has to be terminated on both ends btw -- if the drive's terminators aren't on they'll need to be. Sounds like you're well aware of this though.
# 5  
Old 12-01-2010
No, with a SPARCstation there is no "card" -- it's all on the mainboard (the "SCSI backplane"). There is no way to add termination; that is all handled for you.

http://dlc.sun.com/pdf/801-6393-11/801-6393-11.pdf

A very unorthodox way to implement SCSI but my guess is the idiotproofing is worth it.
 
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