[rescue] Sun Kit Needed for EE Student Here

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 04 May 2006 @ 19:03 -0400, der Mouse said:

> > and your problem has nothing to do with PCs in general.
> 
> In theory, no.  In practice, yes.  In theory, there is no need for a
> BIOS to misbehave like that.  But if some large fraction of them do -
> and I consider that vendor's comments as fairly strong evidence that
> they do - then it's a case of "99% of them give the rest a bad name".

PC BIOS sucks, but the problem you are having hasn't been on any system I've
bought in the last 5 years.

It really sounds like you got a buggy BIOS. Have you tried to find an updated
BIOS and flash that?

It could even be a bug with IDE that the BIOS just can't handle, triggered by
a different drive.

> > I have had a couple of Suns that had the same problem.
> 
> Interesting.  Which models and ROM revs?  

Well, I have to admit now that I've thought about it more, some of it was
about trouble with SunOS and Solaris, not the ROMs, and ESDI and ESDI bridged
drives. I used to hate Sun's disk setup. Actually I still do, but I just
rarely have to use it now that NetBSD is my primary OS.

However, there were also issues with ROM and SCSI, and the units I remember
most were Sun SPARC towers (the VMEbus systems), Sun SS1 and SS2, and my
current Sun SS5.

The symptoms:

The Sun would see the drive, but not the right model or capacity.

The Sun would see the drive, but was unable to boot from it and/or I could not
install the OS.

In all of these cases, a convienient Mac or PC was able to see and use the
drives just fine (except for ESDI, which I never used outside of Sun systems).

The SS5 generally just works, but I did have a drive once that it never saw as
the correct drive, and I had trouble installing an OS on it.  I gave up
trying to figure it out and got a pair of IBM 9GB drives which work
fine.

The largest drive I have tried on the SS5 is an 18GB Fujitsu, and it
also works fine.

> I've seen the 1G issue (where all the boot data must be in the first 1G of
> the disk, because the ROMs don't know how to use 10-byte CDBs), but I've
> never seen them wedge hard because of a too-large disk. 

I never had a Sun wedge either.  Just problems seeing/using particular
drives.

I didn't mean to imply the Sun crashed.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Work for something because it is good, not
just because it stands a chance to succeed." -- Vaclav Havel]