[rescue] SPARCstation 1 boot woes

[Steve Rikli]

Do you have a known-good floppy img file for the SunOS boot diskette?

If yes, then you should just be able to use 'dd' to do the job afaik,
from Linux, BSD, etc.

Way back in 2001 I archived some notes about Solaris floppies from
this page:
        http://soldc.sun.com/support/drivers/copytodisk.html

maybe you can find the original on wayback machine or something, but in
a nutshell, the instructions amount to:

  dd if=<floppy image filename> of=<floppy drive device name>

The Solaris-specific notes also mentioned using "bs=1440k" as an
additional arg to 'dd' command, running 'volcheck', 'eject floppy0'
etc., but if you're doing it on Linux then that stuff doesn't apply.

IIRC the last time I installed SunOS (not Solaris) it was 4.1.3 from CD,
so I'm not much help with netbooting it -- sorry.

Nowdays if I still had SPARC gear I'd try NetBSD, at least as a
troubleshooting step. There are install ISO images, and netboot notes if
you can setup your own server for DHCP, tftpd, etc.  ISO is simpler but
obviously you need a SCSI CD player on your SPARC for that method.  :-)

https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sparc/

>From you symptoms description though, I'd be inclined to suspect the
hardware like you were earlier. That is, if the system goes unresponsive
shortly after the power on banner, it doesn't sound like it's getting as
far as running any OS bits (whether SunOS or other).

Still, trying other (net)boot media is worth a shot; if nothing else it
may point you in the direction of what else is wrong.

Cheers,
sr.


On Sat, Oct 18, 2025 at 05:25:01PM -0500, David McMackins II via rescue wrote:
> Resurrecting this thread as I've done just a bit more looking today. I
> remembered that the OBP has diagnostics to run, so I tried that and
> found that all tests passed (except ones I expected to fail like the
> keyboard and network which weren't connected at the time).
> 
> I'm beginning to wonder if this system actually is fine and all my woes
> are on the software side. My trouble is I don't have a known good SunOS
> boot diskette, so I can't tell if I'm doing anything wrong when making
> one.
> 
> Does anyone have a good source of info for creating a boot diskette
> from Linux? I would also accept instructions for setting up SunOS
> netboot if there were also directions for acquiring the necessary
> files.
> 
> 
> On Wed, 2025-06-04 at 08:48 -0500, David McMackins II wrote:
> > Update: the flicker of video signal got me thinking that maybe there
> > was some sort of issue initializing the video card, so I tried
> > removing it. This granted some progress: the 1.0 ROM now prints the
> > machine info header over the serial line (which it was not doing
> > before). However, after a couple of seconds, I see "Testi" before
> > the system becomes unresponsive.
> > 
> > I thought this might be a RAM issue, so I tried swapping out some
> > SIMMs to no avail. For science I also tried reinstalling the 2.9 ROM
> > in case that too was having issues with the video card, but it
> > behaved the same as before.