[rescue] SPARCstation 1 boot woes

[Michael Dombrowski]

 In these situations I really like pre-built disk images and a SCSI emulator as a sanity check. 
Todd on this list has some for Sun:https://www.oldsilicon.com/workstationdiskimagesI believe the IPC image should work for you.
Once I know that the system is able to boot an OS, then I move to debugging my install process/etc
mike


    On Thursday, May 29, 2025 at 01:01:44 PM CDT, Mouse via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:  
 
 > 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.

That may indicate slightly broken hardware (CPU, RAM, whatever); it may
also indicate that you're not feeding it the correct code.  If you
haven't booted any sun4c diskless before, it's easy to get things
wrong.

If you got to the point of number counting, I suspect you've got RARP
and TFTP working; I can send you a known-working NetBSD netbooter.  It
won't help much without a NetBSD to boot, but (a) it might be valuable
as a crosscheck on what you have so far (if the booter works you should
get at least the netboot prompt) and (b) I could also send you a
matching NetBSD kernel or even a full netboot setup.

Unless you want to run old NetBSD, this would be useful only as a way
to check your boot setup, but that might be useful, and for all I know
maybe you _would_ like to run old NetBSD.  If you're trying to run
SunOS, I think it's pickier about sun4c versus sun4 versus sun4m than
NetBSD is, but I can't recall details - it's been at least thirty years
since I used SunOS.

If you want to contact me off-list and the email in the headers or my
signature doesn't work, I'd suggest mouse at netbsd.org, which forwards to
the same place but sometimes works when direct mail doesn't.

/~\ The ASCII                  Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML        mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email!        7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

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