[SPARCbook] Help replacing SparcBook IDE hard drive...

[William M. Perry]

I have a SPARCbook 3GX with a 2GB drive, but I've recently started getting
really cramped for space.  I purchased a Simple Technology 12.5mm hard
drive (MK6412MAT 6495MB Toshiba according to the back).

So, I copied up my 2GB internal drive onto a 2GB external hard drive, and
can successfully boot off of the external drive.  The plan is to replace
the internal drive with the 6.5GB one, format/mkfs it while booted from the 
external drive, copy everything back, and away you go.

The problem is that the new hard drive is not recognized from the boot
PROM.  I am using the same IDE->SCSI converter that works with the 2GB
drive, but when I do a 'probe-scsi' or 'probe-scsi-all', it never shows
_ANY_ of the SCSI devices on the system, just hangs.  L1-A gets me back to
the openboot PROM.  Removing the internal drive and doing probe-scsi again
shows the external drive and the floppy disk.

So I thought maybe I had the converter on upside-down, so I flipped it
around, and then probe-scsi immediately exits with no devices found.

It is trying to do _something_ to the internal drive, because I let it
probe-scsi run for about 20 minutes just to see if it would ever time out,
and when I removed the drive it was NICE and hot.

>From reading the FAQ, it appears that this type of drive should work (it
mentions only that you need a 12.5mm HD, 7.5 won't work, etc).  Anybody
have any suggestions?

I put the converter back on the old 2GB drive to make sure that I hadn't
damaged it somehow transferring it from drive-to-drive, and that one still
works.

*sigh*  Any clues out there anyone?  If I can't get the bigger drive in
there, I'll probably have to abandon the sparcbook and try to talk work
into buying me an intel laptop.  Ick.  I like being the only person at
meetings with ISDN on their laptop. :)

-Bill P.