SUMMARY: SparcStation LX boot disk failure.

From: Matt Reynolds (reynolmd@aston.ac.uk)
Date: Sat Aug 15 1998 - 11:25:07 CDT


Hi all,

  Finally a summary.

  Believe it or not, the whole problem with the boot disk is SCSI
  termination. It appears we had a bad terminator block, which never
  showed up a problem until I extended the chain by adding the DAT
  drive to it.

  I've even put the drive back in the internal slot and the whole
  system works perfectly.

  Obviously the DAT drive was the straw that broke the proverbial
  camel's back...

  Thanks for advice a plenty from
Glenn Satchell <Glenn.Satchell@uniq.com.au>

  and from

Jeff Kennedy <jkennedy@eiq.com>
Morrison, Hal (Harold B) <hbmorris@ingr.com>

  and a couple of others whose addresses I have lost.

  And for the record: I was concerned mostly because we've NOT got a
  support contract, and are unlikely to get one... (We could probably
  buy an Ultra 5 for the price of a couple of years support contract
  and we could certainly buy a used Sparc LX for the same money!)

     Matt.

Original problem:

  Sparc Station LX won't boot at all from internal Disk Drive
  slot.. (Whichever drive is placed there).

  Boots only very unreliably from an external DISK, but will boot fine
  from an external CDROM.

  Other problems showed up also. (SCSI parity errors and the like)

  Note once the machine was booted, all drives worked perfectly, apart
  from an inability for the system to run in fast-SCSI mode. Fast-SCSI
  drives timed out and dropped to SCSI-1 5.7 MB/sec mode.

  (Not the full text of the original message.)

-- 
# Matthew Reynolds,              | Email: reynolmd @ aston . ac . uk #
# Aston Space Geodesy            | http://www.aston.ac.uk/~reynolmd  #
# Aston University, Birmingham,  | Phone: (+44) 121-359-3611 x4552   #
# B4 7ET. England, Earth.        | Fax:   (+44) 121-333-3389         #



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