SUMMARY: SPARC2 exhibits very strange behavior at boot time

From: Alek O. Komarnitsky (alek@spatial.com)
Date: Fri Dec 06 1991 - 02:43:46 CST


I posted recently about a SPARCStation2 that had just returned from
Europe and exhibited some bizzare behavior at boot time.

Several people commented that the boot and/or ID rom/prom was scrogged
by X-rays. One person also commented to not believe the memory tests, but
I'm confident that's not a problem here. One person commented about SCSI
cable lengths, but there are no external devices on this machines.

I believe the majority has it. The machine now boots reliably from disk
with 48 Megs installed. With 64 Megs installed, it load vmunix, and then
before the kernal/ID/etc. message, the screen goes blank - this is
very repeatable. Finally, it has problems booting diskless: downloads the
boot program, but then says my IP address is 0.0.0.0 Note that once the
machine is running, it seems to operate just fine, so I think this adds
credence to my thinking that it's in the boot ROM. BTW, I don't think (?)
it's the IDprom, since all the parameters look OK, etc (?!?)

Guess I'll have to talk with Sun. Thanx to all who wrote, alek

earl@division.cs.columbia.edu (Earl Smith)
geertj@ica.philips.nl (Geert Jan de Groot)
erueg@cfgauss.uni-math.gwdg.de (Eckhard Rueggeberg)
mstacy@mayo.EDU (Mahlon Stacy 4-4558)
Mike Raffety <miker@sbcoc.com>
caxwgk@pki-nbg.philips.de (Wolfgang Kuehnel )

P.S. Since we've sent machines through X-rays before, I'm wondering if this
is *really* what caused the problem ... and what we should do in the future
short of trying to ask for no X-rays. One also wonders what effect the latest
stuff in luggage bomb detection technology will have on computers ...



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