[rescue] SPARCstation 1 boot woes

[Todd Vernon]

 I have the 2.9 image, but its sounds like you have that one. My SS1 seems
to have V1.0 and it runs fine.  I might be able to dump that image,
although I’ve never done that before.  If someone else doesn’t seem to have
it as a file, I can give it a shot in the coming days.  Let me know.

-t


Todd Vernon
Entrepreneur | Investor
Email: todd at toddvernon.com
LinkedIn: toddvernon <https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddvernon/>


On May 29, 2025 at 8:47:05 AM, David McMackins II via rescue <
rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:

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