[XCSSA] Anyone have experience with a Sun V880?

[John J Hough]

Dennis,

 Can you get to the ok prompt?

 If it has a Sun keyboard attached when it starts looping hit L1-A or
 Stop-A depending on the version of keyboard.

 At the ok prompt do a printenv and check if diag-switch? is set to
 true.  If it is turn it off:
setenv diag-switch? false. 

 It also will be useful to set auto-boot? to false until you know where
 the device is that you installed {Open}Solaris on.

 Then have a look at the device tree with show-devs to see if you can
 your hard disk. 

 If you do, copy down the path to the device, then try:

boot _the_device_path_

 You have to include the slice of the disk you are booting from.  A slice
 is like a partition but not the same.  On Sun Intel/AMD boxes you have to
 partition first and then the slices are inside of a partition.  Anyway
 you address them differently depending on the version of OpenBoot.  It
 might be something like sd at 3,0 indicating the first slice.

 You might also do a probe-scsi-all and see if your disk turns up.
 
 Once you find your boot disk create an alias for it with nvalias so you
 don't have to type the path again and then set the boot-device to your
 alias, and then you can turn auto-boot? true again.

john

Dennis Myhand wrote:
> I am no rising Sun but I would say that they never intended for the 
> machine to boot from the tape drive so there is probably nothing in the 
> firmware that would tell the machine to boot from there, no matter what 
> the install says to do.  Probably, without the Fibre Channel HDs, it 
> ain't gonna boot unless you can figure a way to modify the firmware, or 
> whatever Sun has used in place of BIOS.  JMTC, YMMV, UAOR, VWP, DTTAH, 
> PEACE, Dennis in Victoria
>
> KC wrote:
>   
>> I have this delicious behemoth taking up residence in my garage... A friend saved it from the crusher when I couldn't afford to and then didn't have a home for it... 
>>
>> Spent a few nights working on it. The only thing it doesn't have is the hard drives. FC. Don't have any lying around, and I don't have the caddies, either. Have lots of SCSIs lying around. Hooked up a SCSI drive to the ribbon that Sun intended for a tape drive, instead. Ran through the Solaris 10 install, looked successful, but I speak bash, not Solaris.
>>
>> It installs, but when it tells me to reboot, it just wont reboot. Goes back to Diags and same loops.
>>
>> I'm starting to wonder if Sun intentionally made it so that it would not boot from a non-Sun hard drive... or a hard drive that is not in the original FC slots.
>>
>> Just, off the cuff, anyone know Sun well enough to say if that sounds credible?
>>
>> I'm sure I will keep digging on it...
>>
>> kc
>>
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>
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-- 
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John Justin Hough          Post: UTHSCSA / DEB, Mailcode: 7933
Phone: 210-450-1823              7703 Floyd Curl Drive
Fax:   210-450-1379              San Antonio, Texas  78229-3900

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