About 20 years ago I rescued a fully working Sun SPARCstation LX with CDROM and QIC-150 tape drive - all 3 in lunchbox format - plus monitor when we moved office and management decided they no longer wanted/needed it.
Shortly after I have installed an early version of NetBSD (1.3.3) from the CDROM drive. I played with it for a few days and then stored the entire system in a museum grade glass display cabinet. This is indoors with minimal dust and benign temperatures between 18 degrees C to about 28 degrees C (typical room temperatures here in Perth in Western Australia unless you run the air conditioner). Now retired I took the stack of "lunch-boxes" and the CRT monitor out of the display cabinet and powered it up. After 20 years no smoke came out but the system didn't boot but reported trouble with the NVRAM setting. I still could start NetBSD using a "boot disk" command. I googled the problem and bought and installed a replacement TIMEKEEPER chip (M48T08-100). After defaulting the settings and setting the MAC address and machine ID it was happy and booted from disk without intervention. In NetBSD I then set the date and time and all was good. Then I decided to upgrade to the latest version of the SPARC version of NetBSD 9.0. I downloaded and burned the ISO image to CD. Dropped it into a CD caddy and inserted it into the CDROM drive (SUN Model 411 - really a Sony CDU-8012 3.1e). I did a "probe-scsi-all" and it found both the hard drive and the CDROM (target 6 unit 0). Now comes the problem - if it try to run from it via "boot cdrom" it doesn't even access the CDROM drive - the LED doesn't turn on unlike when you do the "probe-scsi-all". The "cdrom" alias is really: "/iommu/sbus/espdma@4,8400000/esp@4 ,8800000/sd@6,0:d". The "disk" alias is really: "/iommu/sbus/espdma@4,8400000/esp@4,8800000/sd@3,0" The "@3" versus the "@6" are the SCSI IDs of the disk drive versus the CDROM. I don't know what the trailing bits mean. I tried cdrom aliases from "sd@6,0:0" to "sd@6,0:f" and all report: Can't read disk label Can't open disk label package Can't open boot device The LED doesn't blink even once unless I remove and re-insert the caddy with the CDROM media or if I do a "probe-scsi" or "probe-scsi-all". I tried original Sun Solaris 2.4 installation media with the exact same result/symptoms. I also tried to access the CDROM from NetBSD using "cat /dev/cd0a" but the drive's LED didn't blink and I got an obscure error message. The Boot ROM revision is reported as 2.9. The system was bought about 1985 or 1986 and has seen very little use. I searched google without success. Maybe I used the wrong search terms or the equipment is just getting too old and FAQs have disappeared. What would cause the CDROM boot problem? There is a chance that the actual Sony drive died. I partially disassembled it hoping to find dust stuck on the LASER optics but it was nice and clean. The positioning and ejection mechanisms work just fine. The whole system was working before I put it into my relatively dust proof glass display cabinet. Thanks and best regards Tom Hunter
