[SunRescue] Sun 2/120 & QIC-24 (was Sun 2/120 Support for NetBSD)

[James E. Carpenter]

It's nice to see that I'm not the only one with a Sun 2/120!

> I *think* the Sun 2 boot PROM only supported QIC11 tapes for booting.
> Most (all?) Sun 3 tape drives were natively QIC24.

It depends on which revision of the boot PROM you have. I'm 99% sure that
newer revisions could boot off QIC-24 tapes. Revision 'R' is suppose to be
able to handle it.

My 2/120 has revision 'N'. A previous owner seems to have gotten SunOS 4.0
and the 4.0.3 upgrade copied over to 9-track QIC-11 so he could get it
installed.

Unfortunately, the guy I bought the system off of only ran SunOS 3.2 and
never tried to install SunOS 4.x. It took me some time to figure out why I
could boot off the SunOS 4.0 tapes but not read everything off them. I
didn't know about 9-track QIC-11 or that the tapes I had gotten with the
system couldn't be read by the stock tape drive past 20MB. As soon as I got
my QIC-24 sidewinder (which can also read 9-track QIC-11) everything
installed fine.


BTW, if anyone has a 4MB Sun memory card (501-1232) and/or a copy of a
newer boot PROM, I'd love to hear from you. (One of my 4MB cards is
third-party and doesn't seem to cooperate perfectly with the Sun card.)


- Jim

-- 
James E. Carpenter                               E-mail: jim420 at mediaone.net
6 Munroe Drive
Plainville, MA  02762-1108                     ICBM: 42 00' 15"N 71 20' 00"W
PGP: 7ADE9D99  Fingerprint: 8D AF 63 EC D3 51 14 3E  F1 59 8A 68 32 63 3F 8E