[rescue] Help with Sun 3's

[Daniel Salive]

Well, I went through all the 3's I have and I only managed to get one actually
up and running, even after swapping boards around between known good PSU's and
etc.  The one that does work does run perfectly though, and allowed me to test
my monitor so at least I know I've got ONE system here.

I would really like to try and get some more of these working, two of my
friends had expressed interest in one and they're too cool to just let die.

All the rest have one of 3 different issues:

Memory errors/Memory Path errors (most of them)
All 8 lights lit/RESET indicator lit/nothing output even to terminal
or no power at all/dead PSU, but even those machines when swapping the board
to another one that works, still have either memory issues or the reset
indicator lit.

I was going to try testing memory, but I ran into another issue right away!
Pulling the ram on these is diffcult.  There's a special tool online, but I
don't think that it would solve my problem completely - at least not by
itself.  It seems that the contacts stick to the SIMMS extremely well, and
removing the sims even gently and straight up has a good chance of damaging
the contacts.  Not wanting to ruin potentially irreplaceable board parts, I
stopped after removing only two sticks.  I have thought about inserting some
really thin shim stock (like 0.003") between the ram and the contact to get
them out, but I'm not sure if that'll work and there's not enough room to do
that in all the slots, but it's an idea.  Anyone else have any ideas?

Also, anyone know how to test lots of parity 30 pin simms, without using
something with easy to damage slots?

Thanks again for all the help!

--Daniel



>> Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2018 20:04:25 +0000
>> From: Daniel Salive <two32 at hotmail.com>
> >Subject: Re: [rescue] Help with Sun 3's
>>
> >Tried with one of the 3/60's as well and got a similar result, though it's
> >reporting many memory errors.  But at least I got it to talk to something!
>>
>
>You could set the memory configuration jumpers to 4MB, and remove all but 4
>of the DIMMS. Then cycle the sets of 4 DIMMS through the first 4 sockets to
>find the good and bad ones.
>
>--
>Michael Thompson