Last week I asked about a SPARCstation that does not boot when power is
turned on, if a serial device is attached to it. I received about a dozen
responses, and the consensus seems to be that I need to upgrade my boot
PROM from 1.0 to 1.2 or higher. This is a known bug, number 1030076 (thanks
to tgsmith@east.sun.com). I believe you need to exchange the board and not
just a chip. Sun's latest PROM level for SS1 is 1.3.
With respect to SS1's EEPROM settings, <earle@poseur.jpl.nasa.gov> advises:
>Also, beware of having the EEPROM settings for the serial port set to expect
>hardware Carrier Detect (CD), as in "ttya-ignore-cd=false". If it expects
>hardware CD on the port, and there is something attached to the port but it is
>not providing CD, then the same thing (or a variant thereof) will occur.
There were a few people who also suggested reseating SIMMs/framebuffer/CPU
board, but that doesn't seem to apply in my case since I was able to boot
by just unplugging the serial device.
Maybe a list of known bugs/oddities in PROM level can be compiled and
included in the FAQ list.
My sincere thanks to following people:
tgsmith@East.Sun.COM(Timothy G. Smith-Technical Consultant Sun Baltimore)
earle@poseur.JPL.NASA.GOV (Greg Earle - Sun JPL on-site Software Support)
fmrco!stowe!fxs@uunet.UU.NET (Fran Sullivan)
geertj@ica.philips.nl (Geert Jan de Groot)
fabrice@yosemite.ATMOS.Ucla.EDU (fabrice cuq)
Phil Akers <akers@Corona.ITD.MsState.Edu>
steve@wintermute@ucsd.edu ({Darkavich})
Edson Smith <edson%monty@rand.org>
tar@math.ksu.edu (Tim Ramsey)
klaus u schallhorn <cnix!klaus@uunet.UU.NET>
Peter Wallace <pjw@deakin.OZ.AU>
Dean Long <dlong@maple.ucsc.edu>
Original inquiry:
>>Machine: SPARCstation 1, running SunOS 4.0.3c
>>Problem: Does not boot after power if applied.
>>
>>Circumstance: During the holidays, power was turned off on the NFS servers
>>for 2 days. When the servers came back on, the SS1 would not accept any
>>keyboard commands. I powered SS1 down, waited a few minutes, and turned it
>>back on. The Sun Logo gets painted, and that's it. It doesn't even get to
>>the memory test.
>>
>>Anyone have any suggestions on what to look for? I can't very well try to
>>boot this from a tape, etc, since I don't even get the boot prompt. Is it
>>dead forever? Do I need to swap the system board?
>turns out it boots fine if I unplug the terminal attached to the serial
>port. I seem to remember that this problem shows up on SS1's with older
>PROM rev. (Mine is rev. 1.0), but not quite sure. Does anyone have details?
-- John Sin <jsin@janet.ucla.edu> ...!(uunet,ucbvax,rutgers)!seas.ucla.edu!jsin UCLA EE Dept. 53-109 Engr.IV Los Angeles, CA 90024 (213)206-7983
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