Sun 4/280.

[duo]

I'm wondering who here knows about this machine??

I got one recently and it has eleven cards with it.

I have the 4200 CPU board with MB86900 Integer Unit and MB86910A Floating Point Coprocessor and the two Weiteks.

Two ALM-1 multiplexer boards.

A Sun SCSI-3.

A Ciprico RimFire 3525 SCSI.

A Sun 3 CPU board with motorola 68000 series RISC chip.

Three 32mb ECC ram boards.

A Xylogics Tape controller.

A Sun Disk controller.

I had to use an unusual power supply with it because I didn't get the original. The parts I need to still find are a System 3 keyboard and mouse, and an ECL monitor. I actually have the monitor at my other house, but that's too far away to easily ship a 19" monitor. I connected a 1GB SCSI drive to it for starters anyway.

It initializes properly and tries to boot, but I don't have any monitor on it, so I can't see what's happening.

 

[gmh]

Can you try putting a terminal on serial port A? Without a monitor and keyboard, it should be sending console messages to SIO-A.

 

[duo]

I'll try that tonight and see what happens.

I just got a sun 21" color monitor that'll work on here, so tomorrow I'll have a monitor for it anyway,

 

[Lisa]

gotta love those 21" back breaking sun monitors.

 

[duo]

Okay, I got a terminal setup going and managed to use the PROM monitor.

I'm able to enter configuration options in hexadecimal and get it to look at my SCSI devices.

Now what I'm wondering is what's the best way to get an OS onto it?

I'm thinking of setting up another solaris machine on i386 architecture and using it to boot the 4/280 from. I can't think of any ways to get the machine to boot on its own since I don't have anything to connect to it but scsi devices and it doesn't boot from cdroms.

 

[gmh]

It's been many years since I worked on Suns so I'm a little rusty, but it should boot from a (SCSI) cdrom. The problem is, I seem to recall Sun used a non-standard sector size, which pretty much restricted you to Sun cdroms only. There were some work-arounds though. Look at this FAQ and see if it helps.

 

[duo]

I see what the problem is....

And unfortunately, I don't have access to my Toshiba caddy drives, which are probably the very ones listed in that modification.

I'm trying to see if this Sony CDU55S has any data listed on the internet, since it is listed as a 512B/S drive for sun machines.

 

[mryon]

IIRC

IIRC

Most older Apple branded CD-ROM drives will also work.

if I remember correctly, it had to have 512 byte block size
instead of 2k.

Another thing, some older Suns didn't boot from CD-ROM (I don't recall this model) but a nice work around is to dd a SunOS cd to a harddrive and boot from that drive. I've used that trick a few times.

It's been many years since I worked on Suns so I'm a little rusty, but it should boot from a (SCSI) cdrom. The problem is, I seem to recall Sun used a non-standard sector size, which pretty much restricted you to Sun cdroms only. There were some work-arounds though. Look

 

[duo]

Yeah, I was thinking of trying that out.

I suppose I'll give it a go and see what I get.

I'm itching to get this machine running.