[rescue] Help me rescue my Sun Ultra 10 (2x)

Wed Dec 10 17:35:05 UTC 2025

Are any of these more or less likely to be broken you think? Given you've seen so many?

If the boards are broken I'm going to have to find some other Sparc system that can run Solaris 8. Should I look for a Blade tower instead? Assuming the NVRAM doesn't fix it.

-----Original message-----
From: Peter Stokes via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Wednesday December 10th, 2025 18:21
To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Cc: Peter Stokes <peter at ashlyn.co.uk>
Subject: Re: [rescue] Help me rescue my Sun Ultra 10 (2x)

Hi

Those are both later boards (there was one in the middle with 0115 number). The 3060 was the last version and is quite unusual to find, in my time of buying/selling U5 and U10 I only saw a handful of the 3060 boards in hundreds of systems.

Best of luck with your testing!

Peter

Sent from my iPad

On 10 Dec 2025, at 16:04, HP van Braam via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:

Thanks for the info! I for some reason did not think to look at the boards off-axis it seems like :) The full numbers are:

- 3753060010631
- 3750073211165

There are also a lot of references to "Einstein" on the boards, apparently that is a type of motherboard for the Ultra 10 series. Both of my boards have the 440MHz Ultra IIi in it, and both are in a "Creator 3D" case, but one of them does not have any UPA cards installed, nor did it come with one. The other one did come with a UPA card, an afb one. Can run the GL test at ~75fps, for whatever that's worth :)

Thanks so far!

- HP

-----Original message-----
From: Peter Stokes via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Wednesday December 10th, 2025 15:48
To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Cc: Peter Stokes <peter at ashlyn.co.uk>
Subject: Re: [rescue] Help me rescue my Sun Ultra 10 (2x)

Hi

P/n is normally on the board on the large brown UPA connector 

Peter

Sent from my iPhone

On 10 Dec 2025, at 12:32, HP van Braam via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:

Yeah, I purchased some noew NVRAMs I hope they come pretty quickly as I was planning to do a sort of mini-documentary on the SunPCi. I have been reverse engineering the Solaris Kernel interface as well as the actual hardware interface. The idea is to ultimately have Linux drivers for the SunPCi cards, and a less terrible client application for Solaris. I got most things working, but now my development systems are dead. :-/

I couldn't find the p/n on either boards. Where would I find those? Are they actually printed on the boards somewhere? 

Thanks! 

- HP

-----Original message-----
From: Peter Stokes via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Tuesday December 9th, 2025 23:02
To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Cc: Peter Stokes <peter at ashlyn.co.uk>
Subject: Re: [rescue] Help me rescue my Sun Ultra 10 (2x)

Hi

Well the obvious thing is to try a new NVRAM, (use a 48T58) to see if that cures it.

If not then the motherboards were never that reliable and suspect them next. Out of interest what are the motherboard p/n? (370-xxxx)

Peter

Sent from my iPad

> On 9 Dec 2025, at 20:20, HP van Braam via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:
>
>
> Hello!
>
> I have two Sun Ultra 10s with the same fault, and they came to get the same fault in the same way.
>
> They both did the following:
>
> * Started to get IDProm errors
> * Used the "normal" instructions for fixing this
> * Some time later after a reboot things started to go wrong
>
> This sort of worked for a moment, but now when I apply power to either machine the power led stays off (most of the time) in the very rares time when the power led does turn on I can't succesfully boot the machines. Sometimes they end up booting into Solaris but they are not stable.
>
> For instance even dtlogin will just start and cycle on and off until ultimately the system hangs entirely. At this point pressing stop+a and resetting usually doesn't boot correctly.
>
> Swapping around ram/CPUs/power supplies between the two systems has no effect. Removing the AFB doesn't really seem to change anything either.
>
> It seems kind of unlikely that both computers have the same obscure hardware fault in the same component, I hope this is all just the IDProm fucking up.
>
> I tried both of the IDProm chips in my minipro reader and they seem to not really read that same each time. And writing data to the chips doesn't seem to "stick".
>
> Help would be very much appreciated! Thank you!
>
> - HP
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org

_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org

_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org
_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://sunhelp.org/pipermail/rescue_sunhelp.org/attachments/20251210/e7a193ca/attachment.html>