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I have the 2.9 image, but its sounds like you have that one. My SS1 seems to have V1.0 and it runs fine. I might be able to dump that image, although I\u2019ve never done that before. If someone else doesn\u2019t seem to have it as a file, I can give it a shot in the coming days. Let me know.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">-t</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-size:medium;margin-top:0px"><div style="margin-top:0px;font-weight:bold"><div style="margin-top:0px"><div style="margin-top:0px"><div style="margin-top:0px"><font style="font-size:14px">Todd Vernon</font></div><div style="font-weight:normal;margin-top:0px"><font style="font-size:13px">Entrepreneur | Investor</font></div><div style="font-weight:400;font-size:13px;margin-top:0px;color:rgb(80,0,80)">Email: <a href="mailto:todd@toddvernon.com" target="_blank">todd@toddvernon.com</a></div><div style="font-weight:400;font-size:13px;margin-top:0px;color:rgb(80,0,80)">LinkedIn: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddvernon/" target="_blank">toddvernon</a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br>
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<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On May 29, 2025 at 8:47:05 AM, David McMackins II via rescue <<a href="mailto:rescue@sunhelp.org">rescue@sunhelp.org</a>> wrote:<br></div>
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Greetings!<br><br>I have been in possession of an SS1 for several years and have lost<br>many hairs trying to get this thing to boot up. Let me start from the<br>beginning:<br><br>I got this thing for free in a lot of other Sun workstations, and among<br>all of them this was in the worst shape due to the fact that anything<br>which could be pulled from the motherboard was taken. I had no RAM, no<br>NVRAM, and not even a boot PROM.<br><br>Step 1 was to get a boot ROM and some RAM. RAM was of course quite a<br>simple matter, but I had to scour the interwebs to find a ROM image and<br>found one for OpenBoot 2.9 which seems to be the latest supported<br>version for this unit. After flashing a PROM, checking to make sure<br>there were no errors in writing, and installing it and the RAM (and<br>updating the Wikipedia article to have the correct position for RAM<br>bank 0...), I was finally getting some output in the serial console.<br><br>Step 2 was NVRAM. I ordered a brand new unit from DigiKey with the<br>knowledge that there might be compatibility issues, installed it, and<br>programmed it according to a guide that had worked for many of my other<br>Sun machines.<br><br>All seemed well, but when I attempted to boot from floppy, I got an<br>"Illegal instruction" error message. The first thing I tried was<br>cleaning and lubing the drive, then swapping out for multiple different<br>operating systems. I tried two versions of SunOS and also NetBSD/sparc<br>to no avail. Then I took the CD-ROM drive out of one of the other<br>workstations, connected it to an internal SCSI socket, and attempted a<br>few systems that way. Same result. Finally, I looked up how to boot<br>NetBSD/sparc in a diskless configuration and set up another computer to<br>host. Again, all looked well to start: I entered "boot net", saw some<br>numbers running across the screen which I assume is a size counter for<br>the boot program, then finally "Illegal instruction" once again.<br><br>I reached out for some help on IRC and found a user called glitch who<br>runs <a href="http://glitchwrks.com">glitchwrks.com</a> and makes his own replacement NVRAM units for this<br>system: <a href="https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2017/08/01/gw-48t02-1">https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2017/08/01/gw-48t02-1</a><br><br>He very kindly offered to send me one for free, which I accepted. This<br>morning, I installed it, programmed it the same way as before, but<br>still with the same result.<br><br>My only remaining guess is to try replacing the boot PROM with an older<br>version of OpenBoot. However, these seem to be unobtainium. I cannot<br>for the life of me find a ROM image on the web, and even if I go<br>looking around on ebay for other SS1 units, they all seem to be either<br>missing the PROM or have the chip otherwise obscured in a way such that<br>I can't read it to find a Sun part number to look up.<br><br>I stumbled upon this mailing list referenced in a forum post of someone<br>looking for OpenBoot 1.x and figured you are my last hope. Do any of<br>you have such a ROM image laying around you could send me, or perhaps<br>some other things I could check to diagnose a different possible cause?<br><br>Apologies for not digging through the mailing list archives to find<br>this... It's broken into very many sections and doesn't seem to be<br>searchable. I did look in the same year as the forum post and didn't<br>find anything relevant.<br><br>-- <br>Regards,<br><br>David E. McMackins II<br><a href="http://www.mcmackins.org">www.mcmackins.org</a><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>rescue list - <a href="http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org">http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org</a><br>
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