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

[Chris Hanson]

On Jan 24, 2019, at 3:54 PM, Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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?

Yeah, in particular disconnecting from the riser completely shows a different
error than having one or both drives connected.

> 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.

Great advice, thank you! I donbt see it being too bad to cable up a single
SCSI drive.

> 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!!

Thatbs certainly something to consider. I want to use a 120GB SATA SSD with
this system via a SATA-IDE bridge. Ibve done so successfully on plenty of
other systems with great resultsbitbll run at essentially wire speed,
since therebs no rotational latency, so for example a Power Mac G4 will boot
in a couple seconds from one.

In the worst case I can throw a SCSI drive in there and use the SSD with
something else. Itbll be quite fast (for the era) regardless and would let
me run Solaris 8.

  -- Chris