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

[John Hudak]

I think that is a valid problem.

On Sat, Dec 13, 2025 at 6:43 PM Dan Moisa via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org>
wrote:

> 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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>
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