[rescue] SPARCstation 1 boot woes

[David McMackins II]

Greetings!

I have been in possession of an SS1 for several years and have lost
many hairs trying to get this thing to boot up. Let me start from the
beginning:

I got this thing for free in a lot of other Sun workstations, and among
all of them this was in the worst shape due to the fact that anything
which could be pulled from the motherboard was taken. I had no RAM, no
NVRAM, and not even a boot PROM.

Step 1 was to get a boot ROM and some RAM. RAM was of course quite a
simple matter, but I had to scour the interwebs to find a ROM image and
found one for OpenBoot 2.9 which seems to be the latest supported
version for this unit. After flashing a PROM, checking to make sure
there were no errors in writing, and installing it and the RAM (and
updating the Wikipedia article to have the correct position for RAM
bank 0...), I was finally getting some output in the serial console.

Step 2 was NVRAM. I ordered a brand new unit from DigiKey with the
knowledge that there might be compatibility issues, installed it, and
programmed it according to a guide that had worked for many of my other
Sun machines.

All seemed well, but when I attempted to boot from floppy, I got an
"Illegal instruction" error message. The first thing I tried was
cleaning and lubing the drive, then swapping out for multiple different
operating systems. I tried two versions of SunOS and also NetBSD/sparc
to no avail. Then I took the CD-ROM drive out of one of the other
workstations, connected it to an internal SCSI socket, and attempted a
few systems that way. Same result. Finally, I looked up how to boot
NetBSD/sparc in a diskless configuration and set up another computer to
host. Again, all looked well to start: I entered "boot net", saw some
numbers running across the screen which I assume is a size counter for
the boot program, then finally "Illegal instruction" once again.

I reached out for some help on IRC and found a user called glitch who
runs glitchwrks.com and makes his own replacement NVRAM units for this
system: https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2017/08/01/gw-48t02-1

He very kindly offered to send me one for free, which I accepted. This
morning, I installed it, programmed it the same way as before, but
still with the same result.

My only remaining guess is to try replacing the boot PROM with an older
version of OpenBoot. However, these seem to be unobtainium. I cannot
for the life of me find a ROM image on the web, and even if I go
looking around on ebay for other SS1 units, they all seem to be either
missing the PROM or have the chip otherwise obscured in a way such that
I can't read it to find a Sun part number to look up.

I stumbled upon this mailing list referenced in a forum post of someone
looking for OpenBoot 1.x and figured you are my last hope. Do any of
you have such a ROM image laying around you could send me, or perhaps
some other things I could check to diagnose a different possible cause?

Apologies for not digging through the mailing list archives to find
this... It's broken into very many sections and doesn't seem to be
searchable. I did look in the same year as the forum post and didn't
find anything relevant.

-- 
Regards,

David E. McMackins II
www.mcmackins.org