Thanks to everyone who offered their help with this problem. With
regard to the format question:
Rick von Richter [rickv@mwh.com] offered the most pertinent advice -
"You can also do a 'boot cdrom -s' at the OK prompt and it will not go
into the installation process and will dump you to a shell prompt."
Rick's suggestion directly addressed my question which was how to get to
a shell prompt prior to a new install so that I could access the format
utility. It looked to me as though booting from the cdrom demanded that
I continue with the installation program which was destined to fail
because the hard drive was unformatted. A lot of suggestions seemed to
overlook that issue and advised me to use the format utility without
explaining how to get to it when your hard drives are blank.
Regarding the termination question:
Most people misunderstood that question also - which likely wasn't
presented clearly enough - so they just advised me to terminate the
devices at each end of the SCSI chain. What I was confused about was
whether the onboard Sun SCSI constroller constituted the end of the
chain or the disk drive formed the last device. After giving it more
thought I concluded that, given the hard drive has no exiting cabling
(on an IPX anyway), it must form one end of the chain - and I guess the
SCSI controller is auto terminating.
Interestingly enough, the drive is not terminated and its
functioning fine, which flies in the face of what we all know should be
the case - I guess it doesn't mean I won't have trouble down the road.
Thanks everyone for your prompt and generous help - its always
appreciated.
Hagen Finley
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:50 CDT