[rescue] Sparcstation LX Restoration & Help

Tue Nov 26 18:08:02 CST 2019

Hi Curt

Would you be able to post some photos of your Sun 486i inside and out. From
what I hear this is almost a mythical beast up there with unicorns. Would be
amazing to see one.

I had a 3/260 and a 4/260 about 20 years back they were dark grey on the
front and beige grey on the sides/top wishing I had never let them go.

Cheers

Richard

On Wed, 27 Nov 2019, at 6:47 AM, rescue wrote:
> I hate tantalum caps....  I am also in the arcade hobby, and you have 
> to get used to tantalums popping :-).  I've replaced tantalum caps in 
> arcade, on 600MP boards, most recently a Qume 5.25" FH 360K floppy.... 
> they fail short.... sometimes they blow, which makes it easy to find the 
> culprit.... sometimes they just short (and in the case of that floppy 
> drive, trip the PC power supplies protections).
> 
> BTW, You didn't mention SunOS 4.1 version, but in case you're not 
> familiar with SunOS 4 on Classic/LX, they require 4.1.3C or later 
> (4.1.3U1, 4.1.3U1 Rev B, and 4.1.4).  It will not work for 4.1.3, 4.1.2, 
> or earlier.  And if you boot from CD, or copy data from it, sun4m boot 
> partition is partition 3 on the CD.
> 
> One of these days I have to dig out my prototype LX.  Sadly the board 
> was dead, so it has a standard LX board in it.  It is a bit of an 
> oddball, As the top is IPC/IPX, the bottom is LX prototype, and the 
> board is now LX production :-).
> 
> I have a number of Sun projects I have to get back to, a Sun 1/150U, 
> Sun 2/120, and a Sun 486i.  Also have a fair amount of VME stuff, and 
> intend to put together a Sun-3/450 (not sure this was ever offered in 
> the x50 chassis).
> 
> I really would love to find a 4/260 or 3/260 sometime (even if there 
> are no boards in it).  Something about those old brown towers I liked 
> :-)
> 
> Good luck getting the LX installed !
> 
> -- Curt
> 
> 
> On 2019-11-25 11:22, Bill D wrote:
> > 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
> > bbsdb1                    8:17   0 313.8M  0 part  
> > /media/dorsey/Volume
> > 14
> > bbsdb2                    8:18   0  16.3M  0 part  
> > /media/dorsey/Volume 1
> > bbsdb3                    8:19   0  16.3M  0 part
> > bbsdb4                    8:20   0  16.3M  0 part  
> > /media/dorsey/Volume
> > 11
> > bbsdb5                    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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