[rescue] Sparcstation LX Restoration & Help

Mon Nov 25 11:11:22 CST 2019

Hi Bill

Just my guess, but I thought the Sun label from Sunos 5 aka Solaris 2 was
different to Sunos 4 and you may be falling foul of that?

Also you are trying to boot from portion 0, is that the correct one for where
you installed the boot image?

Peter

Peter

Sent from my iPad

> On 25 Nov 2019, at 16:25, Bill D <dorsey at lila.com> wrote:
>
> o;?Twenty years ago, I retired my old Sparcstation LX that had served me
well
> for a number of years.  When I packed it up, it was still working
> perfectly.  After successfully bringing an old Sun 3/80 back to life a
> couple of months ago, I thought it would be a good time to do the same for
> the LX.  I figured things would go smoothly since the machine was working
> when I packed it up.  I couldn't have been more wrong.
>
> For starters, the machine wouldn't power on.  I disassembled the machine
> and removed the power supply and discovered something inside it had leaked
> -- probably a capacitor although I could not find a bad capacitor by
> inspection.  Taking the lazy way out, I ordered a replacement power
> supply.  A week or so later I had the machine reassembled with the new
> power supply and powered it on with some trepidation.  Everything sounded
> normal for a few seconds and I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when
> the power supply started to make a clicking sound.  I immediately powered
> it off but that was when an acrid smell hit my nose.  Damn, I thought, they
> must have sent me a bad power supply.
>
> I disassembled the computer yet again and removed the power supply (the
> smell was really bad when I opened the computer).  I hooked it up to a hard
> drive and powered it on just to confirm it was bad but it came up fine and
> the hard drive spun up just as you would expect.  Could the problem have
> been with the computer itself?  I looked over the motherboard and sure
> enough one of the many tantalum capacitors that Sun had unwisely chosen to
> use on this board had exploded -- the source of the awful smell.  It turned
> out to be a 47 uF SMT tantalum with a 16 Volt rating.
>
> A few days later my Mouser order arrived and I removed the two 47 uF
> tantalums on the motherboard and replaced them with modern 25 Volt rated
> parts.  While I was making the Mouser order, I ordered a 48T08 RTC/NVRAM
> chip as well since I was pretty sure mine would have long since died.  It
> went in right after the tantalums were replaced.  Reassembling everything,
> I once again powered everything on while holding my breath.  This time the
> computer stayed on and didn't make any funny noises!  I let out a breath
> and connected the terminal to the serial port since I don't yet have a Sun
> compatible monitor to hook up to it.
>
> After successfully running all of the selftests, it came up in diagnostic
> mode since the NVRAM was cleared.  I followed the nice FAQ at
> http://lib.ru/TXT/faqsunnvram.txt in order to restore the IDPROM portion of
> the RAM and was able to boot into NetBSD 1.9, the OS that was running so
> many years ago when I retired the machine.
>
> NetBSD is a great OS, but as this is a vintage computer, I'm much more
> interested in running the original SunOS 4.1 on it.  I happened to have
> downloaded two different versions of the CDROM image for it in ISO format.
> I 3D printed a mount for my SCSI2SD card, mounted it, and installed the
> assembly into the LX with little difficulty.  Removing the floppy cover
> allowed me to run a USB cable temporarily into the LX to access the SCSI2SD
> while I get everything working.
>
> Here's where I ran into a little trouble.  I used the SCSI2SD utility to
> create two different SCSI disks on my SD card.  The disks show up just fine
> on my Linux computer as sdb and sdc.  I was able to use gparted to create a
> supposedly sun-compatible disk label.  From there, I used dd to transfer
> the CDROM ISO image onto sdb1.  Running lsblk on Linux I see:
>
> sdb                       8:16   0     2G  0 disk
> b
bsdb1                    8:17   0 313.8M  0 part  /media/dorsey/Volume
> 14
> b
bsdb2                    8:18   0  16.3M  0 part  /media/dorsey/Volume
1
> b
bsdb3                    8:19   0  16.3M  0 part
> b
bsdb4                    8:20   0  16.3M  0 part  /media/dorsey/Volume
> 11
> b
bsdb5                    8:21   0  16.3M  0 part
> bbsdb6                    8:22   0  16.3M  0 part
>
> Examining the mounted volumes, I see what appear to be SunOS install media
> files on reasonable-looking paths.  So I run probe-scsi on the LX and see
> the two SCSI volumes I setup earlier with the SCSI2SD utility:
>
> ok probe-scsi
> Target 0
>  Unit 0   Device type 20  Qualifier  20     codesrc scsi2sd         6.0
>  Unit 1   Device type 20  Qualifier  20     codesrc scsi2sd         6.0
> Target 3
>  Unit 0   Device type 20  Qualifier  20     codesrc scsi2sd         6.0
>  Unit 1   Device type 20  Qualifier  20     codesrc scsi2sd         6.0
>
> However, all my attempts to boot from either disk fail with the same error
> message:
>
> ok boot disk0
> Boot device: /iommu/sbus/espdma at 4,8400000/esp at 4,8800000/sd at 0,0   File and
> args:
> Bad magic number in disk label
> Can't open disk label package
> Can't open boot device
>
> So either gparted lies when it says it makes a Sun-compatible disk label or
> else the label is somehow being corrupted when I dd the CDROM image onto
> the disk when it's mounted under Linux.
>
> My next steps are to remove the SCSI2SD from the LX, mount it into my Sun
> 3/80, and properly label it.  Maybe at that point I will be able to move it
> back to the LX and get it to boot.  If anyone has any other suggestions,
> I'd be happy to hear them.
>
> - Bill
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