[sclug] Sun SPARC help

[Matt]

On Sat, 2004-11-20 at 17:57, Alex Butcher wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Nov 2004, Neil Owens wrote:
> 
> > I have no way of knowing what it's doing - there's no output on 'A'.
> > Sending a Break ( either by 'STOP A' on a Sun keyboard or by sending a Break
> > from TeraTerm) has no effect.  I don't get as far as the OBP. I can't see or
> > find a 'reset CMOS' jumper anywhere.  even if the NVRAM battery is dead it
> > should still get me a OBP prompt......
> 
> Hmmm... are you sure about that last bit?
> 
> It's been a while since I've seen a SPARC with a dead NVRAM battery but my
> dodgy DRAM is telling me that it just hangs, and you don't get to do
> anything.
> 
> Is it worth trying to swap the NVRAM with the one from the working machine
> to be sure?

A dead NVRAM battery will just get you the infamous MAC address of
ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff, etc. when the banner is displayed, it should still
come up to OBP (possibly complaining as it goes).

If you have the keyboard, try hitting/holding Stop+N when you power the
machine on, that should reset the NVRAM to defaults, including resetting
the serial port A settings, etc. so you should be able to get a console.

You might want to check flowcontrol on your terminal settings, (if
you're not totally sure they're correct), IIRC I had hardware
flowcontrol enabled in minicom and that stopped a Sun console coming up.

Other things to check might be RAM, if it hasn't got any, or its duff,
it's about the only replaceable item in the IPX that could cause it to
not work.

Matt

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