[rescue] SPARCstation 1 boot woes

Wed Oct 22 00:04:06 UTC 2025

An increased electrical load during boot was my thought as well.  Can you
remove a board (or two) to reduce the quiescent load?  I'd also consider
checking power and ground connections to the main board.  Oxidation buildup
on power connections could drop the voltage just enough to have weird
behavior.  It's a long shot but it is a cheap and easy task. Can you
monitor the voltages with a volt  meter during a net boot?

On Tue, Oct 21, 2025 at 7:11 PM David McMackins II via rescue <
rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:

> It is with great dismay that I report that this netboot setup exhibits
> the same behavior as current NetBSD. It seems there is a subtle
> hardware issue after all.
>
> The only idea that I've come up with as a shot in the dark is that it
> could be a power supply issue of some sort. That is, during the boot
> sequence (or POST sequence on OBP 1.0), the power demand from the
> system increases, and one of the PSU voltages drops below a critical
> threshold and causes malfunctions.
>
> I don't have a spare SS1 power supply laying around, though, and I'm
> not really sure how I'd go about testing this hypothesis otherwise,
> unless I could measure something very obviously wrong.
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> David E. McMackins II
> www.mcmackins.org
>
> On Tue, 2025-10-21 at 11:42 -0400, Mouse via rescue wrote:
> > > I'm certainly interested in your offer for a 1.4T netboot setup!
> >
> > On ftp.rodents-montreal.org (also available from the same host over
> > HTTP, though I'm not sure what MIME type they'll be served as),
> > there's
> > a directory /mouse/misc/1.4T-sparc-netboot/ which contains three
> > things:
> >
> > -r--r--r--  1 mouse         62008 Feb 26  2002 boot.net
> > -rw-r--r--  1 mouse     155633028 Oct 21 11:14 root.tar.bz2
> > -rw-r--r--  1 mouse        263690 Oct 21 11:15 root.tvf.bz2
> >
> > They're on the wrong end of a fairly slow DSL line, so root.tar.bz2
> > is
> > likely to take a while to fetch.
> >
> > boot.net is the TFTP-loaded booter; this goes in your /tftpboot or
> > local equivalent.  For my SS20s, this needs to be named with the
> > client
> > IP address in uppercase hex, with .SUN4M apppended (the 20 is a sun4m
> > machine) - for example, my diskless-sparc setup puts the machine at
> > 10.0.1.11, so the file is named 0A00010B.SUN4M.  (I have the same
> > file
> > also present at 0A00010B.SUN4 and 0A00010B.SUN4C, though, as I
> > remarked
> > upthread, I can't test those at the moment.  If you've netbooted
> > anything, though, you presumably know what name to put this under.)p
> >
> > root.tar.bz2 is, as the name implies, a bzip2ed tarball of the
> > filesystem tree, in this case a directory named sparc-root.  To help
> > you plan disk usage, du -s on the directory I tarred up says it takes
> > 473108K; allowing half a gig should be plenty.  It contains a kernel,
> > named "netbsd" (boot.net's default name).
> >
> > root.tvf.bz2 is (bzip2 compressed) tar tvf output for the tarball.
> >
> > Checksums:
> >
> > [Tangent] 83> md5 *
> > a62b770cb486bdc8f20c97b9fa2e8a2f boot.net
> > b6ce9b1f1d5d43a6f75f58ad7a415006 root.tar.bz2
> > 8648b985883db652a98ac917975dc8ae root.tvf.bz2
> > [Tangent] 84> sha256 *
> > 7b620a7b6d6c63cd9db9f91c043b8d897f1e9ecd4b1072de7bd593b3c9ec146a
> > boot.net
> > 818949a2e3e6051b35f16e2683cb5b5f6b6387ace3526e50571762cabba6fb9c
> > root.tar.bz2
> > f2b7bcb35f7f22d64dee14e78b54e63b4674977e84053e378be107c00370c56e
> > root.tvf.bz2
> > [Tangent] 85>
> >
> > In case you're interested, the tarball includes /usr/src, including
> > my
> > mutations, though I suspect that's not of much interest for your
> > purposes.  (As its .git/config implies, the same mutations are
> > available by cloning
> > git://git.rodents-montreal.org/Mouse/netbsd-fork/1.4T/src.)
> >
> > I test-booted that root area with an SS20 and it booted fine (to
> > single-user - the embedded rc.conf is set rc_configured=NO, so it
> > won't
> > try to go multi-user even if you don't boot with -s).  As I said
> > upthread, I don't have a sun4c machine to test with at the moment,
> > though I hope to get one of my SLC/ELC boards set up before too long.
> >
> > > > Indeed.  I'm not sure how much point there is in trying to boot
> > > > an
> > > > OS until it passes POST.
> > > Just for the sake of refreshing context, I have both OBP versions
> > > 1.0
> > > and 2.9.  1.0 is failing POST, but 2.9 appears fully functional
> > > except for this issue with booting.
> >
> > That _is_ disturbing.  If the hardware has failed, it's failed really
> > subtly.
> >
> > Anyway, I hope this helps in some way.
> >
> > /~\ 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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>
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