[rescue] NVRAM (was Multia Question)

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

Unless your systems spends lots of hours powered off, the NVRAM still has
a lifespan that was more than enough for the machine's intended lifespan.

If you use a few commands at the open boot prompt you can stop the clock
and dramatically increase the shelf life of pulled chips, and installed
chips for systems that spend lots of time powered off....

Many vendors used these chips.

While I think it would have been much nicer to use a button cell or other
replacable cell I'm fine with the design.

Most of my sun4c boxes spend their time off, so I use the clock stop 
method to lengthen the lifespan of the part.

What I am curious about is if other vendors who used these parts (and
similar ones) like SGI have a way to reprogram a blank part like you
can with the open boot prom in the Sun ?

-- Curt

>From: Frank Van Damme <frank.vandamme at student.kuleuven.ac.be>
>To: rescue at sunhelp.org
>Subject: Re: [rescue] Multia Question
>Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2003 23:50:31 +0100
>User-Agent: KMail/1.5
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>On Tuesday 18 February 2003 18:03, Dave McGuire wrote:
>> > Hmm. I've seen 266MHz 21066 CPUs for the Multia somewhere.
>> > Anyway, even if it's a crappy design altogether, it's still a cool
>> > little playtoy IMO. Heck, even a SparcStation 2 can be useful for
>> > whatever purpose they can handle. :-)
>>
>>    The difference is that a SPARCstation-2 is well designed.
>
>Well designed? Except for one thing at least. As I learned from this list, 
>there is something called nvram, a part attached to the main board, with a 
>battery inside it - battery empty means you can't boot the box anymore and 
>your mac adress gets reset and more evil things.
>
>This approaches the Compaq hd-based bios hack :-(
>
>-- 
>Frank Van Damme
>http://www.openstandaarden.be
>_______________________________________________
>rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue