[SunHELP] Sun Blade 150 with busted IDE, solutions?

[Mark Benson]

Hi,

First off, have you tried all the usual IDE cable voodoo? Maybe disconnect
the IDE cables from the center riser board completely? Checked the drive
jumpers? Sacrificed a live chicken?

As for alternative boot avenues I run my Blade 150 using a 611 external SCA
case cabled to a Sun Symbios PCI SCSI card. I don't have a part number on
hand right now but they are pretty common cards. Just be sure to bag the
LVD version.

It's been a while since I got it running but if I recall one of the PCI
slots stopped the onboard video from working, so be careful of that. Also
the internal PSU was too weak to support the SCSI drive I waved at it,
hence the external case, but honestly because of the centre riser board
it'd be a PITA to cable up a SCSI drive internally anyway.

Of course, I use SCSI on mine purely because it's waaaaayy faster and more
flexible than the IDE. The cynic in me says that the IDE being dead in your
Blade 150 may be the best thing that ever happened to it!!

Hope some of that was helpful.

-- 

Mark

On Thu, 24 Jan 2019, 23:37 Chris Hanson <cmhanson at eschatologist.net wrote:

> It looks like thereb s something wrong with the IDE controller on the Sun
> Blade 150 I just acquired. (It fails test-all even with nothing attached
> and
> probe-ide shows neither the CD-ROM nor HD when they are attached, via the
> Sun
> cable.)
>
> Are there any PCI IDE/ATA cards that can boot this system? (I assume the
> Sun
> SCSI cards can.) How about USB or FireWire, can it boot from those? Were
> there
> any PCI SATA cards that might work, and dare I ask for SATA-III?
>
> I expect to be mostly using NetBSD on this system, so in the worst case I
> can
> use a generic PCI IDE card, booting from the network but keeping root
> local.
> Ib d been hoping to also run Solaris 8 (last version with Open Look)
> though.
>
>   b  Chris
>
> Sent from my iPad
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