[SunRescue] Booting a Sun3

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Sunday, August 29, 1999 at 16:41:18 (-0700), James W. Birdsall wrote: ]
> Subject: Re:  [SunRescue] Booting a Sun3
>
>    You probably got this working a while ago (I'm running way behind on my
> mail), but here's some thoughts:
> 
>    1) Sun-3's will not boot from a disk that has SCSI parity turned on.

Mine certainly do!  (3/260's with not too ancient ROMs and an "si" host
adapter)  I'd have thrown them back out if they didn't!  SCSI parity is
critical and I though only stupid PCs and some MACs didn't support it
properly....

>    2) Sun-3's don't have the 3/0 SCSI ID inversion that SPARCs do. When you
> tell a Sun-3 to boot from the disk with SCSI ID 0, it really does, instead of
> remapping it to SCSI ID 3.

Again, I'm sure my 3/260's do have the sd0 == SCSI#3 translation!

(Note that on any more modern OpenProm systems you can usually set the
probe and boot search order, as I've done on my SS1, SS2, and similar
systems running NetBSD (sbus-probe-list=0123 [instead of [3120]).

>    3) I would think that dd'ing the miniroot onto the disk via another
> machine would work, but I don't know enough about the mechanics of
> bootblocks and such to be sure.

If I've not had a tape to boot from then I've always just net-booted,
but obviously that's only going to work in a select number of situations
too....

(BTW, though I'm fairly new to this list, wouldn't these kinds of
questions be better handled on some other list, such as suns-at-home,
etc.?  Or are we also how to make use of these things once they've been
rescued?  ;-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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