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

[Dan Moisa]

I have a 3/80 that is flaky in a very similar way, I'm suspecting on-board
caps at this point.

Dan.

On Sat, Dec 13, 2025 at 3:40 PM HP van Braam via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org>
wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> Well I guess I celebrated a bit too early... The Ultra 10 worked for a
> day or two but today it was running VTS while I was having dinner, I
> came back to it on the ok prompt, presumably having crashed.
>
> When I tried rebooting the machine now I'm back where I started. With
> the power led staying off when booting the machine. I've tried moving
> my now one new NVRAM chip to the other board, but this also does not
> work.
>
> The same thing happened as the first time too. Earlier today the
> machine booted but complained about NVRAM contents. Then I re-did the
> whole nvram mkp stuff, and `banner` was happy again. But later the
> machine did fail again.
>
> Now, I did use a 48T58Y and not a 48T58 (without the Y), is there any
> chance that that just didn't work right?
>
> Thanks!
>
> - HP
>
> On Tue, 2025-12-09 at 20:18 +0000, HP van Braam 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
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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