[rescue] Sun Enterprise 3500 Wont Boot Solaris

[Andrew Liles]

> On Sep 19, 2017, at 5:13 PM, Carl R. Friend <crfriend at rcn.com> wrote:
>
>  There's also the annoyance of a flat "N"VRAM battery (I want to
> find the guy who came up with that and hurt him), but that's just
> that -- an annoyance.

Yeah the NVRAMs are the worst - Ibve had maybe one machine that didnbt
have a dead one. I looked in the Sun service manual once and it claimed the
NVRAMs on most of the sun4c series were only rated for 3 yearsb& whose bright
idea was that???

My Indy has had problems with RAM, I tried to max it out to 256MB but it
wasnbt cooperating, it passed IDE diags and POSTed just fine but it locked
up while booting IRIX with that much RAM in it.

Otherwise it works OK but something is coupling noise into the speaker (which
for some ungodly reason is part of the power supply in this machine). Ibve
swapped PSUs and Ibve recapped another and it still does it - I have
basically another whole Indy worth of spare parts Ibve swapped around and it
makes this really faint barely audible sound when doing things like dragging
windows around the screen. Ibm guessing in the day the sound of the loud
SCSI HDs and buzzing CRTs that were bundled with these probably masked it -
but in a quiet room with a quiet modern HD and an LCD it is noticeable.

Also the graphics output seems noisy, at least on the LCDs Ibve plugged it
into. Might work better on a CRT if I had oneb&

My Indigo2 and my Octanes all work beautifully, though.

Still, worth having it for that beautiful blue case and the neat startup chime
alone.

-a.