[SPARCbook] Can't boot 3GX off the external SCSI floppy

Dennis Taylor dennis at funkplanet.com
Sat Aug 14 02:25:06 CDT 1999


	Greetings, all. I'm cross-posting this to both lists in the
hpoes that someone, somewhere out there can shed some light on this
problem. I know that other pople have had luck booting from their
external floppy drives, and I'm curious why it's not working on my
machine.

	I've got my external SCSI floppy plugged in at ID 5 (as
verified by the jumpers and probe-scsi-all). I'm trying to remove
Solaris from my machine. I've tried booting off both the Red Hat and
NetBSD SPARC boot disks, using the following command:

	ok  boot /iommu/sbus/espdma/esp/sd at 5,0

	It starts booting fine, the disk spins up and starts working,
and then it craps out after about ten seconds with the following:

	Boot device: /iommu/sbus/espdma/esp/sd at 5,0   File and args:
	Can't read disk label.
	Can't open disk label package
	Type  help  for more information
	ok

	This happens on any disk I stick in there, so it's not a media
problem, and neither of the images I've tried worked, even though I'm
told other people have succeeded with them. I should also mention that
once booted, Solaris is very firm in its opinion that my floppy drive
is actually a tape drive (at sf at 5,0). Weirder still, I have problems
writing to sf at 5,0 from a shell in Solaris; dd and cat give dire
warnings like "write: I/O error" and "<device name>: cannot create"
(when it doesn actually exist). Is my drive broken, or just horribly
misconfigured?

	PS, FWIW: My drive jumpers are: down, down, up, down.

_________________________________________________________________________
Dennis Taylor           "Anyone whose days are all the same and free from
dennis at funkplanet.com    want inhabits eternity of a sort."  - Peter Hoeg
_________________________________________________________________________
   PGP Fingerprint: E8D6 9670 4FBD EEC3 6C6B  810B 2B30 E529 51BD 7B90






More information about the SPARCBook mailing list