[SunRescue] (Help!) Problems with Solaris 8 and SPARCServer 1000E?

[Corda Albert J DLVA]

I recently accquired a 1000E with 4 60 Mhz CPUs and
2 Hard disks (2.1 Gb ea.).  I have been trying to
install Solaris 8 for the past week, and its driving
me nuts (Actually, It doesn't have to drive very far
to get me there :-) Has anyone out there successfully
installed Solaris 8 on one of these beasts?

The system seems to be hanging at various random (non-
reproducable) places in the install. The only error
message is an occasional watchdog-timer reset. Most of
the time, it just stops dead.

The system originally had 2.5.1 on it, which seemed to
boot fine, although I couldn't really test it since
I didn't have the password.

I did a deja search, which turned up a very small amount of
info. The official sun docs site doesn't seem to have
any manuals online for the 1000(E)that I could find. :-(
(If anyone knows where I can find the service manual
for the 1000(E), please let me know!)

My current configuration consists of 2 CPU Boards with
2 60 Mhz modules ea., 640 Mb of RAM, two 2.1 Gb hard
disks, a TGX card and a fiberchannel card. Both external
SCSI buses are terminated. Prom Rev. is 2.31

Things I've tried:
	Memory test diags (all seems fine)
	Reseating the RAM and CPU modules.
	Swapping the two CPU boards (i.e. putting the
	lower board in the top slot. I did this as
	an experiment since I am assuming the installation
	software only uses CPU0)
	Tried using a different hard disk... no luck.

At this point, I'm kind of stuck...is this a Solaris 8
problem, or a problem with my hardware? any suggestions?

Perhaps I shouldn't even be tring to use Solaris 8... The
install is dog-slow (which probably indicates that 8 will
run dog-slow) Is there a recommended version of Solaris
for the 1000? (Linux is out, since a deja search indicated
that it seems to have a problem with SMP on the 1000) Perhaps
I should drop back to 2.5.1, 2.6 or 2.7?  Opinions are
welcome!

-Thanks in advance...
-al-
-acorda at geocities.com