[rescue] Ultra 5 OBP Ugrade

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On 8 May 2002, Ken Caruso wrote:

> I have searched on Sun's site for how to upgrade the OpenBoot firmware
> on my Ultra 5 (270mhz). Every search I have tried on sun.com comes up
> with product pages, and Big Admin didnt seem to be much help either,
> maybe my searching skills are not up to par.

It's on SunSolve, since it's considered a patch.  I don't know if it's
publically available, though.

> I am assuming that I need to upgrade the OpenBoot firmware to get the
> drive properly recognized

That sounds reasonable.

> however I yet to find clear instructions on how to upgrade the
> firmware, and no indication of wether or not I can do this without
> Solaris installed on the machine.

There's a jumper on your system board that you'll need to toggle before
and after[1] doing the firmware upgrade.  No Solaris is needed, as the
firmware upgrade is standalone (it boots from OpenBoot).  The only snag
you'll run into is that you'll need to specify a nonstandard kernel name
(the name of the firmware upgrade file), and that might require editing
LILO's (or whatever loader you're using) configuration.

If you can't get it to load locally, you can always netboot the firmware
upgrade via tftp.  I can't think of a reason why that shouldn't work,
except that it might whine about a lack of UFS partitions.  Type "help
boot" at the OpenBoot prompt for more information on that.

--Jonathan
[1] Technically, you don't have to toggle it back, but life would -suck-
    if Something Weird happened and your eeprom got overwritten by a buggy
    driver.