[Wolves] Wanted: SCSI CD drive to borrow

Adam Sweet adam at adamsweet.org
Tue Jun 16 08:09:32 UTC 2009


Dave Morley wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 15:11 -0700, Adam Sweet wrote:

>> Does anybody have a SCSI CD drive I could borrow? Not sure what the name of the SCSI connection is, but it looks like an IDE connector, just wider with more pins and uses a SCSI ribbon cable which again looks like an IDE cable but with more holes, like the back of this:

>> I've been given a Sun Ultra 30 and it has no optical drive and doesn't seem to like my ancient floppy drive, being non x86 I can't drop the HD in another machine and install it that way and the version of openboot doesn't support DHCP or TFTP. I've been given some stuff on Sun net booting but it's a little hairy and non-trivial. As before, I've had at least 2 of these drives pass through my hands in the last few years and have passed them on. I will only need it for a week or two.

> Does it have USB?  If so can you boot from it?  If not does it have
> serial/parallel?  Although it might be harder to get one of those
> caddies now.  If the answer to any of the above is yes you could
> probably just get an external caddie and either drop you cdrom onto it
> or put on a couple of extender cables so you can.

No, this is a Sun machine from their pre-commodity hardware days. I have
installed a USB card but the openboot (like a BIOS for Sun Sparc
machines - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware ) can't boot from
it. It does have a parallel port but I don't want to buy anything when
it's a one off operation.

> If you had the Alpha back off of James did that not have one? 

That's a reasonable point, but I didn't get it from him, I'm hoping he's
forgotten ;)

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