[SunHELP] SS5 headaches

[Mark Benson]

Hi,

Been a looong time since I posted to this list, but here goes.

I am trying to revive my SPARCstation 5 and a few things seem to be 
bugging it.

Firstly the RAM seems to be very patchy, some banks seem to flake out 
with very little physical disturbance. I've reseated all 8 banks (256MB 
total) several times and it works for now but even just moving a RAM 
card will cause it to not show on POST.

Secondly I get the dreaded 'IDPROM contents invalid' message after POST 
which I assume means the IDRPOM battery had died and I should replace 
it. I can't remember, was there an issue wit hthem forgetting the MAC 
address if the IDPROM dies. That seems to still show up on the OBP boot 
start screen?

Thirdly OPENSTEP 4.2's installer (OS 4.2 works just fine on SS5s, by 
apples recommendation, and this is a 110MHz, not a 150MHz) won't boot. 
The installer runs through the initial questions then, whil loading the 
hardware drivers, I just get a 'Watchdog reset' and it drops to the OBP 
prompt (I take it that means it's crapped itself and the OBP assumed it 
had crashed?).

The SS5 is bare apart from a 9GB hard drive, S24 (tcx?) SS5 framebuffer, 
and a QE card. Using an external DVD-ROM drive which is known to work 
okay and works well with Suns (it's in a Sun 711 case, so 
auto-terminates also)

All help appreciated.

-- 

Mark Benson
twitter.com/MDBenson