[rescue] HAL computer systems SL/100R

[Bill Bradford]

On Mon, May 27, 2002 at 08:33:39PM +0100, Full_Name wrote:
> Hi,
>    I have recently acquired a pair of HAL computer systems SL/100R.  These 
> are 19" rack mounted units using a Sun AXi motherboard and (AFAIK) a Sun 
> UltraSPARC IIi 333mhz processor, 9Gb SCSI HD, SCSI CD-ROM, floppy and PCI 
> quad ethernet card and ATI Rage graphics card via some bizaar header (as 
> far as I can tell the header is just so the cards can be fitted parallel to 
> the motherboard).  

Yep, thats just a "riser card".  All it is is a horizontal PCI slot adapter.

> Since I got them the power supply on one of them appears 
> to have died; when the machine is plugged in and the power button is held 
> down, nothing happens but it works when connected to the other machine's 
> power supply.  My questions are numerous and varied:
> 1. If it possible to repair / replace the power supply- are there any likely 
> easy fixes?

Its just a standard ATX PC-style power supply; these are ATX form-factor
motherboards and can go in a standard PC case.  This machine that servers
the SunHELP web pages and mailing lists is an AXi 440Mhz.

> 2. Is it possible to acquire more RAM (currently each has 256mb in two of 
> eight DIMM slots) the motherboard manual says it will support up to 1gb 
> (with 256 & 512 mb DIMMs is it possible to go higher?) and requires 60ns 
> 168pin EDO ECC DRAM DIMMs

MemoryX and crucial.com carry RAM for these machines.

> 3. Is it possible to run Solaris 8/9 or UltraLinux on them?  The SPARC port 
> of Debian can allegidly be run on a SPARC64 but is the lack of a bootable 
> floppy drive a problem?

All of the above will work.  I run Solaris 8 on mine.

> 4. Are there any "Linux on a floppy" distro's that will work on them to see 
> how much of the hardware works, etc.

I'd go with Solaris instead of Linux.  I dont think these boards can actually
boot off of a floppy drive.

> 5. Given that www.hal.com is long gone and Fujitsu claim to have not even 
> heard of HAL is there anywhere I can get (more) documentation for these?

Just go to Sun's web site; HAL just sold them, and didnt make them:

http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/nep/hardware/boards/axi/

That should be everything you need.

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford     
mrbill at mrbill.net 
Austin, TX