[rescue] SPARCstation 1 boot woes

[Andrew Jones]

I would not count on a 30 year old floppy drive to work properly unless extensively tested.   They're fiddly beasts, and decades on the shelf is unkind to rubber, lubricants, etc

Knowing this is an attempt at a floppy boot, "Illegal instruction" sure sounds like corruption to me.

(My only other thought: those early SPARCs don't have hardware multiply/divide, but NetBSD is pretty careful about that to retain compatibility.  I really doubt this is a v7 vs v8 problem.)

I have always netbooted old SPARC systems.   It is very easy to do, with one proviso: systems with the old AMD Lance ethernet sometimes have trouble with modern micro-switched networks.   It works fine after the OS boots, but the firmware does not consistently behave well.   



On Saturday, October 18th, 2025 at 23:46, David McMackins II via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:

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