[Sunhelp] Expert needed! .. SparcClassic appears 'dead'

[Derek Piper]

        Hi,  

        I wonder if anyone can help me.. I've recently got a little
SparcClassic to play around with at home and although when I got it it    
appeared to work fine, it now appears not to.
        The big problem is when I turn the power on, the banner and white
screen does not turn up at all. When pressing Stop-d during power-on to
initiate the POST sequence the caps-lock light flashes its stuff and then
goes out. All lights flash briefly and then stay off. None of the 
error lights flashes or lights singly, leading me to believe the system   
has passed its tests. Yet still the screen is blank where it was not
before. The monitor I use is the same one as I use for my PC (where I'm   
typing now) and I've been using a monitor adaptor to use this monitor on  
the Sun. Normally without doing anything the machine would auto-boot the  
Linux installation I only just installed on the machine (and rebooted and
restarted a couple of times without problems). The machine does NOT boot  
though and just sits there with the power light on and nothing on the
screen.
        I have checked all connections, made sure the logic board is well
seated into the connector backplane. I've tried booting with and without  
the SCSI drive attached, I've tried running the Stop-d POST diagnostics   
with a VT420 attached to the serial port (at 9600 8-N-1 as per the Sparc  
Service Manual and the settings I had seen and remembered previously from
when the machine was operational and I'd done a 'printenv'). The terminal
reports nothing and no lights on the keyboard (A Sun type 5c) show
anything either.
        In short, has anyone else had this problem and if so, how did you
solve it, if you did? .. Any expert advice from any Sun gurus out there
would be REALLY appreciated. It seems so strange that the machine was
working fine but now is seemingly dead.
        I am going to contact the place where I got this machine and see  
what they have to say too, but I thought I'd ask the many people on this  
list to see if anyone knows.

        Thanks,

        Derek


-- 
Derek Piper - del at delphinian.com - http://www.delphinian.com/