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Just picked-up an IPX - question about RTC and SunOS

RichCini

RichCini

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Aug 7, 2005
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Location
Long Island, NY
All --

I just picked up a nice-condition IPX that I've already replaced the NVRAM battery with a carrier board from Glitchwrks (highly recommended BTW) and now I have an odd problem when booting into SunOS. Last night I was able to boot into SunOS, and I tried setting the date, but it wouldn't set. So I left it for the night and picked up today and figured I'd try the clock start procedure on http://www.obsolyte.com/sunFAQ/faq_nvram.html.

Now what's happening is that when SunOS boots, it warns that the clock time is invalid (makes sense), but continues through the boot-up. While IDing the partitions, when it hits the dump partition (sd0b), it stops; there is also no activity on the drive. Now, I just noticed that the size of the dump partition is smaller than the RAM I have (size 50.6MB versus 64MB), but that didn't seem to be an issue last night. I pulled two sticks of RAM to drop the core size below the dump partition size, but that didn't seem to help.

I didn't plan on doing a clean install since there are programs already on the drive that I haven't gone through yet. So, any pointers on where to go next with this would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Rich
 
Are you using a separate dump partition or are swap and dump the same? I've always used dump = swap and I don't recall having issues with swap being smaller than RAM but I don't do it that often either. Also are you sure the NVRAM is set up correctly because SunOS is very picky about the contents of NVRAM, much more than other OS are. Finally is your termination set up right? SunOS can hang at boot probing the SCSI bus if termination is wrong.
 
It came configured with swap and dump in different partitions. NVRAM setup per the various FAQs. If the external connector is supposed to be terminated, it's not, but I have connected an external SCSI enclosure that's terminated and it doesn't seem to matter. This was working last night and now it isn't. So kind of odd.
 
Sounds like this is an original drive that already had SunOS installed on it. Is it possible the drive is dying? It is over 30 years old now. Have you tried testing the drive in another machine and testing another drive in the IPX. Or you could set up a net boot system and try to access the drive from that. Setting up net booting is pretty easy for this machine assuming you have another unix system around.
 
Well, the system does load the kernel from the hard drive and it probes the system devices but when it gets further into the boot it halts after probing the dump partition. So I don't think the drive failed but maybe the partition now had an issue. I have another SCSI drive I can try but the CD drive I have doesn’t have a 512 byte block setting so I’m stuck unless I create a whole NetBoot environment. I did grab a new CD drive on eBay so I’m in a bit of a holding pattern now.
 
Thanks. I may also change to the ZuluSCSI and ditch physical drives all together. I really want to investigate what's on this hard drive before I ditch it. It had some references to "wavestepper" in the password file so I kind of feel it was used in an industrial setting.
 
To correct one thing from earlier, I noticed that swap and dump point to the same partition (sd0b) although they report different sizes by maybe 22 bytes. I did order a ZuluSCSI board and, as mentioned, a proper CDROM drive. So When that stuff comes, my plan is to create a SUN2.1G image for ZuluSCSI and start from scratch. If I can get that working, I'll just connect the old Fujitsu drive as a secondary drive and then see what's on it.
 
Hopefully you manage to read the drive and find something interesting because SunOS software is rather rare these days.
 
Closing this out, I got a second CDROM and booted to the miniroot environment. This allowed me to fsck the old drive and reset the time to something more palatable. Once that was done, it booted just fine. I will still convert this to the ZuluSCSI and shelve the old hard drive.
 
RichCini said:
Closing this out, I got a second CDROM and booted to the miniroot environment. This allowed me to fsck the old drive and reset the time to something more palatable. Once that was done, it booted just fine. I will still convert this to the ZuluSCSI and shelve the old hard drive.
Click to expand...
Smart choice. I put in a ZuluSCSI in my IPX as well. Older hard drives are nice, but just too fickle.
 
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