On Fri, 28 Aug 2020 at 17:43, Tom Hunter via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > 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).
I have nothing useful to add on the CDROM, but regarding upgrading NetBSD, one option would be to setup a netboot server and upgrade that way. Once setup it also provides an easy way to boot any sparc box with a working network interface (handy for when a Quantum 105 has a sticktion day :). David
