[rescue] Sun Enterprise 3500 Wont Boot Solaris

[Carl R. Friend]

On 09/19/2017 08:27 PM, Andrew Liles wrote:
> Yeah the NVRAMs are the worst - Ibve had maybe one machine that didnbt
> have a dead one. I looked in the Sun service manual once and it claimed the
> NVRAMs on most of the sun4c series were only rated for 3 yearsb& whose bright
> idea was that???

    Somebody Hell-bent on planned-obsolescence and who could never have
known that the chips would someday go unobtanium?

> My Indy has had problems with RAM, I tried to max it out to 256MB but it
> wasnbt cooperating, it passed IDE diags and POSTed just fine but it locked
> up while booting IRIX with that much RAM in it.

    I'm not sure what's up with that, because I have two rather fat
Indys with 256MB (including one with a Presenter panel) that work
just fine.  They may be overly sensitive to differences in access
speed and the ratings of the SIMMs.

> Otherwise it works OK but something is coupling noise into the speaker [...]

    This may not be coupling but rather vibration of the parts of
the switching power supply itself.  I have a DG NOVA 840 (vintage
1972) that I can tell how hard it's working by ear because the
switching supplies make different noises depending on how large
the load is -- and the harder a machine is working, the more
current it draws.  How does the Indy sound when listening to the
line-level output?

> Also the graphics output seems noisy, at least on the LCDs Ibve plugged it
> into. Might work better on a CRT if I had oneb&

    See above.  Try the line-level into an off-CPU amplifier and
see how it sounds.  I've had one of my Indys as an integral part
of my stereo system for years and they sound great.

> My Indigo2 and my Octanes all work beautifully, though.

    Beautiful systems both!

> Still, worth having it for that beautiful blue case and the neat
> startup chime alone.

    That startup chime is quite a shocker played through a high-
powered audio system in the morning when you forgot to properly
shut everything down the prior night!

    Cheers!

-- 
+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | Boylston            |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
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