[SPARCbook] no boot?

[Markus Mayer]

Hi!

Matthew Haas wrote:
 
> >From what I've experienced, the SPARCbooks do not have an NVRAM battery of
> their own-- they use the power of the battery or wall-outlet... somewhere
> I heard that if the SPARCbook was without a battery or any source of power
> for more than 36 hours all of its configuration data in the NVRAM would be
> lost.

It seems that I can confirm this, although I left mine only about 24 hours
without battery / power source. I posted the problem already quite a while
ago, but I'll repeat it again while we are at it. Maybe this helps a little.

On power-on or reset, after displaying the SPARCbook screen and checking the
memory, the system will hang (only Pause-R/Pause-O work in this situation).
One has to press Pause-A *before* it hangs, then the machine works
normally (entering 'boot' at the OK-prompt will cause the system to boot
normally). At the next reset it will hang again, however.

Some of the information the system displays at boot:

MAC-Address: 00:00:83:77:77:77 (should be 00:00:83:ae:17:69)
Host-ID: 80777777 (should be 80ae1769)
Machine-Type: SPARCbook 3XT (should be 3GX)
(uname also returns the wrong machine-type)

Someone from Tadpole diagnosed this as:

> The system's eeprom has lost the systems details and or has failed. It is
> not possible for you to re-program the device, this can only carried out
> either here in Cambridge or at our US office.

But I also hot this advice:

> Try changing the value of one of the OBP parameters.
> example: ok setenv boot-device net
> then see if that value is saved after a power cycle.
> if the value is not saved, then the lithium battery has failed.

Changing the boot-device (and other OBP-variables), however, works without
trouble.

So, I really don't know what to do (except that I don't like to pay $350/GPB
250, even less so at the currently bad Euro<->US$/Euro<->GPB rates).

Regards,
Markus