[SunRescue] Newbie with an IPX

[Ken Hansen]

An IPX w/32 Meg RAM & 400 Meg HD is a good starter system.

Missing magic number indicates that a previous owner probably had
the drive in a non-Sun application. Formatting the drive should take care
of that problem...

As for boot devices, the floppy drive should work, but the machine has
probably sucked almost 10 years of dust thru the diskette drive - it might
be unusable/really dirty. A CD-ROM drive needs to support 512 byte
block sizes, some early Apple SCSI drive supported this, the CD300
(I think) was one example - see the DR-ROM FAQ linked offf of Bill's site
( http://www.sunhelp.org ).

The cable you used for the keyboard concerns me - who sold you a keyboard
without a cable? If you are stuck for a cable, write me off line (I think I have

a spare or two - I'd be happy to send you one for the cost of postage). If the
boot ROM finds a keyboard it will use the builtin framebuffer, but yours is not
being detected (since you are seeing boot messages on the serial port).

To repeat:
    Your HD needs to be formatted, that should be an option off the Linux
    boot diskette (which is probably broken) or the CD-ROM, which you
    said you were getting...

    Your CD_ROM needs to support 512 byte sectors - check the CD-ROM
    FAQ and the jumpers on the drive (either block size or sector size).

    Your keyboard cable is suspect, write me off line and I'll see if I have a
spare
    known good cable to send you.

Good luck, hope this helps...

Ken
n2vip at njcc.com

MMJ wrote:

> I recently bought an IPX on ebay. It has 32 MB of ram and an  400 MB HD.
> ROM version is 2.3. When i boot it up, it says something about a missing
> magic number and can't find sun disk label. I made a boot floppy from the
> boot32.img (redhat 6.1), but when I hit enter, it says it can't find the
> partition on the floppy. I am at a loss. I have some experience with Linux
> and FreeBSD as well tons of experience with the Macintosh platform, but this
> is the most proprietary box I have ever seen. I am buying the Redhat 6.1
> distribution and I am looking for a suitable CDROM. I have tons of drives
> from the Mac side, and my other question is will they work with the Sun?
> Also, I got a type 5 keyboard on ebay, and used a din 8 cable from a Mac,
> but the  computer doesn't recognize the keyboard and boots to tty a. I
> hooked up a dumb terminial so I could see what was going on. Any help would
> be appreciated.
> regards,
> jim
>
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