[SunHELP] SS5 Booting Problem

Dave Garten sunhelp at sunhelp.org
Wed Sep 26 07:09:16 CDT 2001


Shawn,

Two things.  1) The system monitor does not see a keyboard.  If it does not 
have one attached/operational, the system will shift display from a monitor 
to the serial port.  Since you have reported seeing the contents of a screen, 
I suspect you have already figured that out...

2) The ">Boot device..." line you sent indicates the system it set to boot 
from a default SCSI device ID of 6, 'slice' d (...sd at 6,0:d).  The SCSI ID of 
six is usually reserved for CDROMs in SPARCStations.  The 'normal' boot disk 
SCSI ID is 3.  A disk drive inserted into the lower tray of the two internal 
SCA SCSI trays will be 'set' to SCSI ID 3 by the subassembly board it is 
attached directly to.  So, to boot from it, type (at the > prompt) 

boot /iommu/sbus/espdma at 5,8400000/esp at 5,8800000/sd at 3,0

This will send the monitor to the 'lower' disk for boot.  If there is nothing 
there (physical or software), you won't get much farther.  If the default 
alias for CDROM has been changed, your system may 'behave badly' if you try 
booting from a CDROM (command '>boot cdrom' ...to load Solaris or LINUX for 
instance).  

Alternatively, you can attach a SCSI drive to the external SCSI port and set 
it to SCSI ID 6.  It might be a good idea (presuming you are the root user of 
this box) to reset the system to the factory defaults unless it has some 
funny attachments or is running something peculiar from a CDROM that requires 
hte default boot disk to be SCSI ID 6.

I recommend you read (and perhaps download a copy of) the OpenBoot 2.x 
Command Reference Manual from http://docs.sun.com.  Search for 'OpenBoot' and 
it will be item one.  It describes what is going on behind that little ">" 
and gives you GREAT POWER over Sun boxen.  And you can find out how to reset 
the factory defaults, too....8)

V/R

DG

Shawn Wallbridge <shawn at maximum-geek.com> said:
> Boot device: /iommu/sbus/espdma at 5,8400000/esp at 5,8800000/sd at 6,0:d  File and 
args:

-- 
Dave Garten
dgarten at nova dot org
dgarten at totalimage dot org





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