[rescue] The Non Booting Ultra 1 mystery solved

[Todd Vernon]

Though I would report back since several of you were so kind to offer
suggestions.   For a refresher I have an Ultra 1 that would run NetBSD just
fine and boot the NetBSD install CD but could not boot any Solaris Install
Image from CD or Image on Zulu.

By chance I noticed that the year was wrong in the date.  Everything else
in the Timekeeper was fine.  When I noticed the date being incorrect I set
it and powered down and rebooted it.  Again the date was wrong but the rest
of IDPROM was still correct.  I happened to have another Timekeeper with an
external battery so I popped it in and reprogrammed IDPROM.

Solaris Install CD’s and images would then boot into the installer.
Apparently, not all of Timekeeper fails simultaneously.  There must be
other values stored in there other than what you can see because I doubt
the date was keeping the installer from running.  Six months debugging
finished!

The reason I was even pursuing this entire thing is 64 bit NetBSD runs
SUPER slow on my Ultra 1.  Compile times on my U1 are 2x my Sun IPC!  I did
a quick install of 2.6 on Zulu last night and compile times of the same
library are more inline with my SS10 now.  Still a bit slower than I would
expect but I believe 2.6 is a 32bit OS and the Zulu pegs out at 10Mb/sec.
Going expand the testing to Solaris 7 or 8 and 20Mbit SSD that I have.

Thanks for the help guys!


Todd Vernon
Entrepreneur | Investor
Email: todd at toddvernon.com
LinkedIn: toddvernon <https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddvernon/>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://sunhelp.org/pipermail/rescue_sunhelp.org/attachments/20240412/832f15c3/attachment.html>