Hi Joe,
>>Recently acquired an old Sun SPARCstation-1.
>>Can't get it to boot from CD.
> A lot of the older SGIs and Suns required that the CD drive DEFAULT to
>512 bytes/block or else they won't work. The newer systems issue a SCSI
>command to the drive to set it to 512 bytes/block but the older ones didn't
>issue the command and if the drive didn't default to that then you wouldn't
>work. On some drives like the Toshiba 3401s you could change the jumpers
>to control the number of bytes/block that it defaulted to. Just a quess
>but I could be completely wrong.
Thanks! That was exactly the problem. Dug around in my parts and found a
Toshiba 3401 and cut the required traces to make it default to 512 byte
blocks, and the machine booted right up - installing from the CD as I
type (and it looks like it going to take a while....)
Regards,
Dave
--
dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Vintage computing equipment collector.
http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html
Received on Sat May 15 2004 - 16:59:38 BST