[rescue] Unpopular speech and Screwy SparcStation LX

[Joshua Johnston]

Geeez.  A bit of tension here, folks.  I'm glad to see it starting to
fade, which is quite good.  Last night I was involved in a little
"Unpopular Speech" of my own, playing the moderate in an IRC room full
of Mac owners.  Being the rare sort of person that has three
architectures in his bedroom (yeah, yeah, chump change) and finds a
valid use for any of the three, I tend to draw a lot of ire from both
the PC lusers and the Mac weenies.  Usually I can calm them down by
saying every system has a purpose.

Speaking of purposes, I keep running into a rather irritating issue at
the moment.  I'm trying to resurrect a SparcStation LX I won on eBay,
and it's giving me some rather distressing problems. For one, I can't
seem to get an installation on it.  The seller sent me (for a few extra
bucks) a set of Solaris 8 install CD's, but burned them wrong.  I can't
seem to get the damn thing to load due to a magic number error. So last
night while I slept (dialup user) I downloaded a NetBSD/Sparc ISO.  That
works up until it begins installing packages with pax, then spits out 20
lines of what appear to be SCSI errors for every file extracted, and
then chokes at the very end of the base.tgz volume with an stdin error
and a request for

Input archive name or "." to quit pax.
Archive name>

... and a stubborn refusal to accept any package after that point.  It
just chokes flat, claims a bunch of read/write errors on the internal
disk, and halts.  I reboot, and sd0 doesn't exist unless I hard
power-down the machine and turn it back on.

Is this a cable or termination issue?  Do I have bad RAM?  Erf.  I
actually spent money on this thing, and really hope I can resurrect it.

- Josh