[rescue] Booting a Sparcstation 5 with 1 good 1 bad HD

[rswqdfnptj at snkmail.com]

We have an ancient Sparcstation 5 for those few clients that still run SunOS or Solaris. After the last power outage (4 years ago?) we never turned it back on. It had been making some unpleasant noises back then, too.

Now we need it again and it won't boot.

The machine came with one hard drive and SunOS (not sure what version). We bought an additional HD and put Solaris (an early version) on it. The HDs are both IBM 2gb SCSI. The bottom drive is SunOS and the top one is for Solaris. We've deduced that the original ( SunOS, bottom) drive has failed -- when it is in the bottom bay we get a notice

The SCSI bus is hung. Perhaps an external device is turned off

upon powerup and the machine hangs (keyboard does nothing). We also hear a sad whine, dropping in pitch, every few seconds (like maybe the HD is trying to spin up, fails, and then spins down). The whine is still there if we switch the drives around, but we don't get the "SCSI bus hung" notice.

We took out that hard drive and only left the Solaris drive in there (on the bottom). Now when we boot, before we can type anything we get

Boot device: /iommu/sbus/espdma/esp/sd at 3,0:a  File and args: cprboot
root on /iommu at 0,10000000/sbus at 0,1001000/espdma at 5,8400000/esp at 5,8800000/sd at 3,0: a fstype 4.2
Boot: cprboot
Boot:  lookuppn failed: No such file or directory (errno 2)
copen: bad vn_open
boot failed
This is strange to us since in the past we had to type boot disk2 or boot disk3 at the ok prompt.

We really only need to boot into Solaris. Is there some way of changing the drive so we can boot off it? Something about the nvram?