SUMMARY:Installation-problems-Solaris2-3

From: Jiao Lingxiu (lingxiu@cc.umanitoba.ca)
Date: Sat Sep 02 1995 - 13:25:30 CDT


Thanks to everyone who replied to me, and special to

Alan Chan <alanc@jumbo1.me.CdnAir.CA>
Andy McCammont <amccammo@lehman.com>

and to

Kev <kevin.Sheehan@uniq.com.au>
Bill Goodridge <sysadm@its.brook.cuny.edu>

The solution was:

The machine was installed again without external disk with the help of experienced administrator at UM by unselecting some unnecessary operating files because the internal disk has 312 MB space. The installation was successful, no error messages appeared.

Alan Chan also gave me suggestions to sovle black bar problems.

Now we are trying to solve the black bar problem on screen after closing OpenWindow.

Thank you very much for help!

Lingxiu Jiao E-mail: lingxiu@cc.umanitoba.ca
Department of Gelogical Sciences Tel(O): 204-474-8415
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Canada

-------------------------- My original posting -------------------------------

I am a new administrator (a new Ph. D student too) with only one month experience. I met problems when I installed Solaris 2.3 on the machine of SPARC station 330, ROM revi 1.1, 32 MB memory connected with one CD_ROM and 2.1 GB external disk. I have strugglled solving installation problems for nearly two weeks. The machine should work at the beginning of the new term, next week.

I used local installing method. The problems are that when I boot from CD-ROM, the machine was running very slowly; during installing, some error messages showed on screen, such as:

             sd6: incomplete write - retrying
             ...
or
             sd6: incomplete write - retrying
             WARNING: ........
                   ......... given up
             ...
or
             esp: addr=ff380000 dmacnt=10 last=ff37f601
                  last-cnt=9ff
             esp: Cmd dump for Target 3 lun=0
             esp: cdblen=6 cdb=[0x8 0x0 0xd0 0xd0 0xc0 0x10 0x0]
             esp: pkt_state=0xf<XFER, CMD, SEL, ARB>
                    pkt_flags=0x1 pkt_statistics=0x1
             ...

after installation, the machine did not prompt the information about inputing the root password, instead it prompted several black bars on the screen with
write background. After I login and close the windows, the machine promted the short black bar but not 'hostname console login: ' information on the screen.

I tried to install Solaris 2.3 to the machine at least 6 times, although there were different error messages when installing each time, the black bar screen problem appears everytime after closing window and finishing installation.

The brief information of our machine is:
SPARC station 330, ROM revi 1.1, 32 MB memory; one sun CD_ROM; one 2.1 GB external disk; the total length of SCSI cable is less than 6m.

Does anyone know what happens with the machine and give me some hints and advice to handle these problems?

Any help will be much appreciated!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_________________________ Alan Chan wrote ___________________________________

        These are SCSI errors. There are a few things you should check:

- Make sure all SCSI cabling is secure. Reseat all conectors.
- Make sure it is properly terminated.
- Check for bent pins in al SCSI connectors
- Halt the machine, at the console prompt, do a "probe-scsi" and make sure
   the machine sees all scsi devices
- Make sure all scsi devices are not internally terminated
- Make sure all devices have different scsi addresses and no duplicated
   addresses
- Make sure scsi address 7 is not being used. It is reserved for the
   controller
- Remove all scsi devices and just leave the CD hooked up. Do a "probe-scsi"
   and make sure it sees the CD. Then add one device at a time and do
   "probe-scsi" again. This can tell you which device is causing the error.
- The main disk drive should be set at scsi ID 3
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

___________________________ Andy McCammont wrote _____________________________

looks like you've got scsi problems - try installing without the external disk
on, then add the external disk after the install and boot -r.

I assume you've checked termination, cables, cable length etc. ;-)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_________________________________ kev wrote __________________________________

Almost certainly cabling - I use the 6 inch cables exclusively when I can,
but 6m is way over. The bottom line is the shorter the better, and good
quality.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

___________________________ Bill Goodridge wrote _____________________________

sd6 is usually reserved for the cdrom, with disks at 0,1,2,3 and tapes
at 4 & 5.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_____________________ Alan Chan wrote for black bar problem __________________

        This sounds like a video problem to me. Openwindow uses a different
video plane than the plain unix prompt. When Openwindow exits, it switches
you back to the text only plane. This sounds like a switching problem.
Try to boot with "boot -r" to make sure the system configure the video
card properly. Also make sure you install the latest openwindow server jumbo
patch. If you are not using the default console port on the motherboard,
your video card has to have a higher SBUS priority than the default console
port. This can be set by "eeprom" of "setenv" at the console prompt.
The parameter is "sbus-probe-list". The system should probe your vedeo card
first before the default console port. Hope this helps.
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