[SPARCbook] no boot?

[Swift Kick]

Hello all.

I have been following this discussion for the past few days, and today I
decided to see if and how my S3GX was affected.  I had left it
unplugged, sitting on a shelf, for the past 4 months, with less than 1/2
of its battery charge left.
When I opened it up, the battery was fully drained (as I expected).
Plugged the A/C adapter into it, hit the power-on button. Everything
came up normally, without any incidents, and resumed my OpenWindows
session as usual (I had suspended the system). 
Maybe I am just lucky, but I have not seen any weird behavior at all,
and haven't experienced any of the issues that have been described here.
There is nothing special about my SB.... just a 3GX with 32mb ram, 1.2gb
drive, and a 3com pcmcia ethernet adapter, nothing else...

Regards,

-Paul
-- 

Paul Santos                                      uzziel at erols.com

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GIT/TW/O d+@ s+:+ a-- C++(+++) UBLS+++$ P++ L+++ E---
W++@ N+ o? K? w-- !O M-- V-- PS+ PE Y+ PGP+ t@ 5>5+@ 
X+() R- tv- b++ DI+++ D G e+>e+++ h! r% y+*
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------



Markus Mayer wrote:
> 
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Sparcbook mailing list  -  Sparcbook at sunhelp.org
> http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/sparcbook