I posted recently about a SPARCStation2 that had just returned from
Europe and exhibited some bizzare behavior at boot time.
Several people commented that the boot and/or ID rom/prom was scrogged
by X-rays. One person also commented to not believe the memory tests, but
I'm confident that's not a problem here. One person commented about SCSI
cable lengths, but there are no external devices on this machines.
I believe the majority has it. The machine now boots reliably from disk
with 48 Megs installed. With 64 Megs installed, it load vmunix, and then
before the kernal/ID/etc. message, the screen goes blank - this is
very repeatable. Finally, it has problems booting diskless: downloads the
boot program, but then says my IP address is 0.0.0.0 Note that once the
machine is running, it seems to operate just fine, so I think this adds
credence to my thinking that it's in the boot ROM. BTW, I don't think (?)
it's the IDprom, since all the parameters look OK, etc (?!?)
Guess I'll have to talk with Sun. Thanx to all who wrote, alek
earl@division.cs.columbia.edu (Earl Smith)
geertj@ica.philips.nl (Geert Jan de Groot)
erueg@cfgauss.uni-math.gwdg.de (Eckhard Rueggeberg)
mstacy@mayo.EDU (Mahlon Stacy 4-4558)
Mike Raffety <miker@sbcoc.com>
caxwgk@pki-nbg.philips.de (Wolfgang Kuehnel )
P.S. Since we've sent machines through X-rays before, I'm wondering if this
is *really* what caused the problem ... and what we should do in the future
short of trying to ask for no X-rays. One also wonders what effect the latest
stuff in luggage bomb detection technology will have on computers ...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:16 CDT