Sun 3/60 - how to boot this thing?

[Holger Veit]

Edward Tomasz Napierala said:
> I just got a Sun 3/60, 8MB RAM, no disk.  I have several questions:
>
> 1. Were these used with an external disk?  There is some room inside the
>    machine, but there are also several strange looking capacitors there.

You can use a SCSI disk there, but then, depending on the model and
capacity, you need to set some parameters in /etc (IIRC some format.dat
file) to make it known to SunOS. Typically, those machines where used as
diskless clients from a bootp server with sufficient storage. The client
boots from the network and receives a tftpboot image which then pulls in
the SunOS kernel and uses NFS to mount some /export/root, /export/swap and
/usr file systems. /export/root and /export/swap are per-system instances
of the root file system and swap file for the client, /usr is usually
readonly for all clients.

Unless you have a boot media (QIC24 tape or floppies) and can hook an
external drive to the machine, you better set up a server for diskless
clients. This can also be a Sparc machine.

> 2. With diag switch set to "norm", there is nothing (no output) on the
>    serial console; the machine just blinks one of the LEDs.  With diag
>    switch set to "diag", the following appears:
>
> Boot PROM Selftest
>
> PROM Checksum Test
> Context Reg Test
> Segment Map Wr/Rd Test
> Segment Map Address Test
> Page Map Test
> Memory Path Data Test
> NXM Bus Error Test
> Interrupt Test
> TOD Clock Interrupt Test
> MMU Access Bit Test
> MMU Access/Modify Bit Test
> MMU Invalid Page Test
> MMU Protected Page Test
> Parity Test
> Memory Size = 0x00000008 Megabytes
>
> Selftest passed.
>
> Type a character within 10 seconds to enter Menu Tests...
>                                                           (e for echo
> 							  mode)
>
> Is that a sign of EEPROM problem?  Failed battery?

The above is correct behaviour. With the diag switch set to NORM, the
machine expects a keyboard/mouse and monitor; it will then usually wait
for a boot command at the ">" prompt. Typing "b le()" attempts to boot
from the server; "b st(0,,0)" would boot a QIC tape to be connected, "b
(0,3,0)/vmunix" should boot a disk connected to SCSI with normal settings
IIRC. You should also see a ">" prompt after self test at the serial
console.

Regards
Holger