WOrking with unknown SunSparc

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WOrking with unknown SunSparc	by Bill Degnan - 09/15/2026 14:24
probing a sun system given the internal disk is disk3... things you can do from the ok prompt: 1. set your external scsi boot device to address 6 2. from the ok prompt: (if hard drive, and fallback to default "disk"): setenv boot-device disk6 disk (if CD rom or similar and then try disk6) ok setenv boot-device cdrom disk6 (sometimes you have to enter it this way) ok setenv boot-device disk@6,0 disk 3. view changes ok printenv boot-device 4. apply and reboot (one or the other depending on rev of openBoot ok reset-all ok reset Three things can happen 1. drive is not available or error 2. System boot up into SunOS of some sort (expect errors if the external device is from a different computer than the computer being used to probe the drive 3. You get the error, "The file just loaded does not appear to be executable" means OpenBoot successfully communicated with the external storage drive, found a partition structure, and read a file into memory. However, because OpenBoot expected a bootable kernel file (like vmunix or inetboot) containing specific Sun SPARC executable headers (ELF or a.out formats), it stopped and threw this error when it found incompatible data instead. In short, its not a boot device / it's storage media. USING A SERIAL TERMINAL Hopefully your Sun uses 9600/8/H/1 and you can just go about your thing, but I needed to set my Teraterm to 9600/7/1/Even/XON Xoff FALLING BACK TO THE SUN ROM from the # prompt (logged in as root), enter the command init 0 ..if that does not work try the halt command. This will throw you back to the main console (12W video and Sun keyboard), so if you were using a serial terminal you may lose your session. If you can't even get that far, try STOP+A checking expected I/O devices: (from the OK prompt) printenv input-device printenv output-device set SUN OS to always test for SCSI devices reboot -- -r (this tells SUN to reboot and update the boot config). You can also do this from the ok prompt using the boot -r command probing your SCSI chain probe-scsi (use STOP+A from the console to drop to the ok prompt). From the ok prompt you can get back to your OS session by running the go command at the ok prompt. Reply