[rescue] SS5/Netra Progress of sorts...

[Sandwich Maker]

" From: William Barnett-Lewis <wlewisiii at gmail.com>
" 
" []
" 
" So I sigh, hang my terminal off the serial port and there we are. Dead
" NVRAM but everything else seems to pass. So for giggles I pop in the
" OpenStep 4.2 installer and "boot cdrom" It does it's thing but when loading
" the installer I get a watchdog reset. Hmm. Try again. Same result.
" 
" Next step, put in my SunOS 4.1.4 disk as the SS5 was on the OK list for
" that. Boot it and it tries to start but the kernel fails when it tries to
" load the machine type from NVRAM. Ah! sez I. Possibly what the OpenStep
" installer was doing in it's opaque way as well.
" 
" If I am understanding this sequence correctly, all I should need it to pick
" up a MT48T08 RTC chip from a vendor (I have digikey up in another tab),
" install it and reprogram it from the the prompt?

yup.

" I see that Digikey has two types listed: 100PC1 & 150PC1 which I am
" guessing refers to the speed of the part? Which is needed by a SS5?

iirc the original ss5/ss20 chip was 150 or even slower [250?].

" Oh, that reminds me, if I scrounge another SCA 1 or 2 gb drive, I can have
" one loaded with OpenStep and one with SunOS and choose which to boot into
" from the prompt?

yup again.  back when solaris was new, i set a machine up with 4.1.4
on one disk and 2.4 on the other, with shared /var, /export, and swap.
it was a testbed for software that ran under both.

you could even do it on one [larger] disk, changing the slice you boot
from.  if you look at the disk aliases, a default slice of :2 is
coded, but that's just tradition.  i once booted a sunos machine from
the /usr subdir where the default vmunix lives.

with sunos, there's no point to a disk larger than 9g unless you
install disksuite [1.0]; slices are normally limited to 2g max.
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
adh at an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought