SUMMARY: NEC CD-ROM on Sun4

From: Wolfgang Huwig (wolf@sol.cs.uni-sb.de)
Date: Sat Jan 18 1992 - 06:52:40 CST


A few weeks ago I asked about using a NEC CDR 36 CD-ROM on a Sun 4/280.
I got no hint about this special combination but some helpful information
on 'unusual' combinations in general.
Here's a summary of the answers I received.

Tenor was: READING should be possible but BOOTING is the problem.

Chances are good that a SPARC machine (sun4, sun4c) can read from any
CD-ROM if it runs under 4.1.x (evtl. 4.0.3 and a special driver from Sun)
and the drive supports 512 byte blocks.

Non-Sun CD-ROMS are unlikely to allow booting on any Sun machine.
Even Sun's CD-ROM allows booting without problems only on sun4c machines.
For sun4 machines this depends on the prom, cpu and SCSI rev levels
(sun3 machines seem not to work at all with non-Sun CD-ROMs).

Possibilities to get some problematical combination to work together are
purchasing the Sun Common SCSI Arch driver from Sun Consulting or a
special driver from some 3rd party vendor such as Young Minds.
While experimenting a bad SCSI bus may destroy data on a connected hard
drive, so try on a diskless machine first.

I haven't actually tried to connect the drive because I'm still waiting
for our latest OS version :-( and have no cable yet.
If I get it to work I'll let the net know.

Thanks to:

ddl@burrhus.harvard.edu (Dan Lanciani)
harrison@faraday.physics.utoronto.ca (David Harrison)
peter@radig.de (Peter Radig)
geertj@ica.philips.nl (Geert Jan de Groot)

--

+-------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------+ | Wolfgang Huwig | CS Dept./AI Lab | Intelligent remark | | wolf@cs.uni-sb.de | Universitaet des Saarlandes | goes here ... | +-------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------+



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