SUMMARY: Can't boot Sparc 1's off of SunOS 4.1.1 CD-ROM

From: Kevin C. McMahon (kevin@saber.com)
Date: Wed Sep 04 1991 - 14:00:10 CDT


I apologize for taking a while to summarize this.. anyway, here it is:

The Problem:
-----------
If I try to boot some Sparcstation 1's I have off of the SunOS 4.1.1
CD-ROM, they load the kernel and then crash saying:

assertion failed: pmg != NULL, file: ../../sun4/vm_hat.c, line: 2316
panic: assertion failed

Does anyone have any idea this happens?

The Answers:
-----------
>>From: phillips@athena.Qualcomm.COM (Marc Phillips)
>>
>>This happens if you have over 24 megs of ram in the
>>machine. (actually on some machines it is 32, and others
>>it is 24). So, just take out the extra ram (leave 32 in
>>a sparc 1 I think----it is the ipc's that you should
>>take down to 24), and then reboot off of the CD. After
>>uyou have down what you have done what is needed off the
>>cd, power it off, put the ram back, and reboot off
>>the hard drive.

This is what I tried and it worked. Utter craziness... I took the Sparc 1
from 28 meg to 12 meg, installed it, and put the memory back in. Before I
tried this I tried net-booting the machine with 4.1.1, but I couldn't do
that either.

>>From: Kenton C. Phillips <kenton@space.mit.edu>
>>
>>Here are a couple of possibilities:
>>
>>The very oldest sparc 1's won't run under 4.1.1. You can get a free
>>upgrade from Sun (at least I don't think they charged us for it).
>>You have to look at the cpu board to see if it's that old. Part numbers
>>prior to 501-1382-10xxxx are defective.
>>
>>See SunOS 4.1 Release Notes (Revision A, 6 March 1990, Part No. 800-3802-10),
>>page 8, section 3.7.
>>
>>Other people have said that they've had problems with upgrading SS1's when
>>they had 4MB SIMMS plus 1MB SIMMS, and the 1MB's were in the lower slots.
>>I haven't experimented with this, myself.

I thought this was it, but when I talked to Sun hardware support, they said
that this was deceiving. They said that the 10 in the 501-1382-10 actually
referred to the rev number which is on a different sticker on the cpu board.

>>From: jxh@icdwest.ICD.Teradyne.COM (Jim Hickstein)
>>
>>It might be the arrangement of memory in the machine. Do you have a
>>combination of 1MB and 4MB SIMMs? If so, the 4MB SIMMs must be at the
>>lower addresses. If not, 4.1.1 won't boot. Chances are you added 16MB
>>to a stock machine (one with 8MB in 1MB SIMMs installed) simply by adding
>>the 4MB SIMMs to the empty sockets; under earlier releases this was OK,
>>but under 4.1.1 it won't work.

I haven't tried this yet, but it sounds interesting. I'll do it with the
next bunch of sparc's I install.

Thanks for other similar answers from:

arrent!angel@uu.psi.com (A. R. Rivera)
johnb@edge.CIS.McMaster.CA (John Benjamins)
From: zjat02@trc.amoco.com (Jon A. Tankersley)
From: uunet!deltam!flyer!mark (mark galbraith)

 ___ ____
| / | Kevin McMahon kevin@saber.com
| | | Saber Software Inc. uunet!saber!kevin
| \ | 10 Fawcett Street postmaster@saber.com
| | | Cambridge, MA 02138 (617) 498-3259
|___ /___| Fax (617) 868-6655



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:19 CDT