[rescue] Old style Sun CD

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 06:24:53PM -0500, Kevin Loch wrote:

> My plextor 4x will boot on 3/60's with cdrom bootable roms.

My experience is with SUN4 machines, maybe someone else can verify it
on SUN3. The SCSI-2 standard includes a command to switch to 512 byte
secotrs from the normal 2048 byte ones. Many SCSI CDROM drives incorporated
this command, for example, Sony, Plextor  and Toshiba*, but never NEC.

The SUN4 ROMs that had the CDROM option for the boot command, issued the
"mode set" command before reading the disk.  If your ROM did NOT have 
the CDROM target for the boot command, you had to use a CDROM drive preset
to 512 byte sectors. 

It's always a good idea to specify your location in the request. I'd 
gladly lend you mine (2x panasonic set to 512 byte sectors) or a toshiba,
but I don't think you would want to pay the expense to pick it up or
return it.

BTW, has anyone tried this with an HP?

Geoff.


* Every Toshiba SCSI CDROM drive I have tried (5 or 6) did this, even a
3201 which predates the modifyable to 512 byte sector 3401.


-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: 972-544-608-069  IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 
I may be an old fart, but I'm a high-tech, up to date old fart. :-)