[rescue] SPARCstation 1 boot woes

[David McMackins II]

Hey, thanks for the info!

I realize that not all the original context was included from earlier
in this thread. The short version is that I was originally on OBP 2.9
which got a lot further, up to the point of attempting to boot, but I
always got "Illegal instruction" after the boot program is loaded from
any medium (including network).

My test OS has been NetBSD, but I did try booting SunOS 3 from floppy
created using dd on Linux.

If it's a hardware issue, I'm really at a loss as to what I could check
next.

-- 
Regards,

David E. McMackins II
www.mcmackins.org

On Sat, 2025-10-18 at 16:32 -0700, Steve Rikli wrote:
> 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.