[rescue] Sun2/120 SunOS 3.2 suntools movie (was: advise on Sun2 disk install)

[Walter Belgers]

Hi,

> On 5 Dec 2018, at 11:50, Andy Piercy <andy.piercy at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm very interested how you manage to get the Sun box to boot by directly
> connecting a SCSI drive to the SCSI port and by-passing the ESDI formatter
> card.

There is nothing to it really.. the Mbus SCSI card has a standard 50-pin SCSI
connector that connects to the SCSI(-1) disk using a standard SCSI ribbon
cable. Nothing else in between. I have no ESDI controller in it at the moment
and I also do not have any ESDI drives.

> Can you let me have a picture of the formatter PCB that the Sun box use
> please, is it an OMTI card?

I do not know what a formatter PCB is nor what an OMTI card is. In the Sun it
is just the SCSI controller, ribbon cable and the disk.

> The reason I'm interested is I have a few Multibus Masscomp 6500, which all
> use theOMTI 7400SCSI to ESDI converter and as ESDI hard drives are
> difficult and expensive and also becoming more unreliable with age i have
> been looking for a replacement solution.
> I have wondered if you can just bypass the interface card and attach SCSI
> drives directly to the SCSI cable and then replace the spinning disks with
> a SCSI / SD card device - but not been brave enough to try it out!

If the card is SCSI then why not just try it out? At least with SCSI, putting
the cable in the wrong way does not fry your board (as is the case with
ethernet..)

Walter.