[SunRescue] Boot prom incantations on SparcStation 4/330?

[James Lockwood]

On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak wrote:

> James...  Are there any drive limitations on the 4/330 as to
> drive size or number of drives on the bus chain, in SunOS or
> Solaris?  I was thinking Solaris 2.4 fixed the drive size limit,
> but don't remember offhand for SunOS 4.1 (1 gig?) or 4.1.3 (1.3 gig?).

I've ran 9GB drives on SunOS 4.1.3u1.  From what I remember the only issue
there with large drives was the fact that "format" would time out during
an operation that involved the entire drive.  Partitioning and newfs'ing
the drive was fine.

SunOS 4 without Online:DiskSuite will be limited to 2GB partitions.
Regardless of your OS you should make the root partition no larger than
1GB if you want the kernel to boot reliably.

Any of the operating systems you listed can support 7 devices on the SCSI
chain, though you will need to rebuild the SunOS 4 kernel to allow that
many.  I would advise against that many devices externally unless most of
them are in one or two large cases with short wiring as the 4/330 has
quite a bit of SCSI cable internally.

> Also, can you confirm the scsi cabling from the cpu through the
> drive bays and then out to external?
> 
>                  top plug ----------terminator or external drives?
>                      |
>                      |
>     cpu   -----  bottom plug

Correct.  Note that the long cable going to the external drives is fairly
squashed and bent in places and I had frequent failures when maintaining a
lab of 20 4/330's.  The first thing you should do if you have SCSI
problems is to replace that cable or move internal devices out.

If you are going to run external devices (or an external terminator, which
I recommend) then you need to pull the terminating resistor packs under
the metal plate on the top rear of the case.

> Any other quirks, offhand, especially about the nvram chip.
> I have been having bad karma with failing nvram chips lately.

Never had any problems with mine.

-James