[rescue] Sparcstation LX Restoration & Help
rescue
rescue at hawkmountain.net
Wed Nov 27 10:09:45 CST 2019
On 2019-11-26 19:08, Richard wrote:
> 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 believe I'm long overdue for that :-)
It does have a mythical status, but there are a small handful of them
out there.
They were in the beta phase when Sun put "all the wood behind one
arrow" (Sparc).
I'm long overdue in getting this thing back up and running. I do have
original OS tapes as well (which work on 386i and 486i and is a
beta of 4.0.3 ??? (going by memory, I may be wrong on the version)
>
> 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.
Well, unfortunately we can't keep everything, no matter how much we
want to.
I really need to find one of those. I worked for Sun, and did
participate in gutting some for parts (bridge controllers, drives, etc).
I owned a 3/470 (Pegasus) at one point, I let that go to someone else
(configured as a 4/370), and I'm sure it was eventually scrapped.
Those are even larger :-)
I think my favorite VME chassis I own is the 5 slot, as it will allow
me to put together various systems out of all my VME cards w/o taking up
as much space as a X/X70.
But I do hope to find a X/X60 chassis sometime.
-- Curt
>
> 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
>> > 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
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>> _______________________________________________
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