SUMMARY: non-sun cdrom drives

From: Fausto Almeida (fausto@gia.ist.utl.pt)
Date: Mon Nov 20 1995 - 11:48:49 CST


Hi,

My question was quite simple:
>
> > Can I use non-SUN cdrom drives? If so which ones?
>
> Quite a fair number. The main condition is that it
> gets jumpered to 512 byte blocks. I recently added
> a Panasonic 503B SCSI to my Sparc 2/SunOS 4.1.3 system.
>
> NOTE: PC CD-ROMS are jumpered to 2048 byte blocks. *SOME*
> of them have jumpers (eg the panasonic), some of them
> require soldering to change settings and some can not
> be modified :-(
>
> rgds
> Stephen
>

Aparently some cdroms with a 512 bloking factor will refuse to boot:
>
> They must be SCSI and they must have a switch enabling the blocking
> factor to be set to 512 bytes. Many CDROM drives us that and 2364
> but the suns only support the 512 setting.
>
> We've used DEC RRD-42 and various Pioneer drives in addition to...
>
> Be aware that some Sun boot proms can't cope with booting off non-Sun
> CD-ROM drives. This problem is only to do with booting though; both
> High Sierra and UFS accesses work fine even on machines that can't
> boot off non-Sun drives.
>
> Regards, Bevis.
>

There's also a FAQ on cdroms
>
> read FAQ: CD-ROM Drives on Sun Hardware
>
> from the faq:
> >> Finding This FAQ
> >> ----------------
> >> I will post this to alt.cdrom and comp.sys.sun.hardware, as
> >> well as rtfm.mit.edu. I am not setting up a distribution list on email
> >> for it, but if you send me mail asking for the FAQ I have no problem
> >> with sending it to you. Give me a month and I will try to configure
> >> some sort of auto-reply system.
>
>
> ---
> Oliver Landsmann (shark@geo.sbg.ac.at)
> I haven't lost my mind, it's backed up on disk
>

Thanks to all of you that replied:
shark@geo.sbg.ac.at (Oliver Landsmann)
sweh@mpn.com (Stephen Harris)
B.King@surrey.ac.uk
dougj@xray.ufl.edu (Doug Jones)

--Fausto



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