My collection is primarily sun4c and sun4m machines. I have been having problems with the CD drives that I have been acquiring (purchase or rescue) in the last year or so. 4-5 drives, none worked. It has all been drives in 411 cases or going into them, no failures with internal drives. Haven’t investigated why.
> On Aug 28, 2020, at 14:22, Tom Hunter via cctech <cct...@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). > > > > 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
