Not able to boot NetBSD 10.1 on Sparc Station 20

[tonata]

I have CD-RW disk with NetBSD 10.1 sparc 32. The NVRAM is invalid.
It should be something like that from the PROM to boot on Sparc Station 20:

boot /iommu/sbus/espdma/esp/sd@6,0:d

or

boot /iommu/sbus/espdma/esp/sd@6,0:f

But it does not boot. I tried both the internal CD and an external SCSI player. Both are detectable with

probe-scsi

I am missing something. The external CD player has a terminator. The external CD is known to work correctly, not sure for the internal.

 

[tokenalt]

Does the cdrom support 512b blocks? Also you don't need to type out the full path of the device you can just use the devalias cdrom.

 

[tonata]

Does the cdrom support 512b blocks? Also you don't need to type out the full path of the device you can just use the devalias cdrom.

Thanks.
The external yes. I configured it myself, but it is not a Sun scsi drive. It is yamaha.
The internal is the original, so I assumed it is properly configured.

 

[mdog69]

Off the top of my head
1. You are testing with only one CDROM drive connected?
2. Have you tried testing the internal CDROM on another computer (eliminates the possibility of a dead laser on the internal drive - which is the one most likely to work)?
3. Search the internet for your Yamaha drive, and see if there is a jumper you can set to 512bytes, and set the SCSI id to 6.
4. Eliminate the NetBSD CD by downloading and burning a SunOS 4.1.4 (aka Solaris 1.1.2) CD-R, then try booting off that (or any other known working Solaris media you might have to hand.

If you still have no joy, I suggest you use the serial console port (if you aren't already) and capture the "header" information output when booting, and also what you are seeing when you do probe-scsi and post it here.

Also you need to tell us how the boot from CD is failing - what error messages are you seeing. Is the CDROM spinning up? Does it timeout or spit an error straight away?

 

[tonata]

Thanks.
So I managed to boot Solaris 9 32 bit on my Sparc Station 20.
I used ImgBurn for Windows, 650 MB / 74 min CD-R (Boeder CD-R), at writing speed 8x.

boot cdrom

worked.
The boot partition is at ../../sd@6,0:d (not f!)
Both the internal Toshiba and my external Yamaha are working.

I will resume the NetBsd tests later.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

FWIW, every single time I've installed NetBSD on a Sparc machine (regular or UltraSparc) I've done it via network instead of a CD-ROM, you might want to consider trying that. The Sun machines are *really* easy to Netboot and it nicely sidesteps all the gotchyas you have to deal with either finding a compatible CD-ROM drive (if the machine doesn't have an internal one), or problems writing a disk that an ancient SCSI CD-ROM drive will be happy with.

 

[mdog69]

FWIW, every single time I've installed NetBSD on a Sparc machine (regular or UltraSparc) I've done it via network instead of a CD-ROM, you might want to consider trying that. The Sun machines are *really* easy to Netboot and it nicely sidesteps all the gotchyas you have to deal with either finding a compatible CD-ROM drive (if the machine doesn't have an internal one), or problems writing a disk that an ancient SCSI CD-ROM drive will be happy with.

Seconded. Also for the record, I've used netboot to install a standalone OBP upgrade on Ultra5 and Ultra 10 boxes to break a vicious circle where you can't boot from CDROM, and you can't install the OBP upgrade to fix it because you can't boot from CDROM...

Note that netbooting really needs a working NVRAM, otherwise you'll have to reprogram the MAC address after each and every power cycle - a real PITA.

 

[tonata]

My NVRAM is dead.
I manage to boot NetBSD 9.3 32 bit SPARC without problem using: ImgBurn for Windows, 650 MB / 74 min CD-R (Boeder CD-R), at writing speed 8x.
happy!
Now I need a cheap HDD.