Bootup Error

[glovato]

Help,

I purchesad a 2nd hand Sun Sparc station with Linux Solaris as it's Operating system and everytime I bootup a receive the following error message;
IDPROM contents is invalid
Power on self-test failed....Replace TOD/VVRAM
Testing 24 megs of memory.
Sbus slot 0 le esp dma
" " 1
" " 2
" " 3 cgis

Tybe b(boot) c(continue), n(new command mode)

- I typed "b" or "c" to no help..

 

[mikeclark]

Power on self-test failed so it looks like you have a problem on the system board. I don't know whether you can replace or reload eproms etc but your best bet might be to see if you can get your money back from where you bought the system and buy one that works.

 

[glovato]

Are you sure the above reply is the only solution .....Anybody else wants to give it a try....

 

[ianf]

Looks nasty doesn't it !

Depending on the type of sparc, you can flash the EPROM from CD or floppy (on later Suns), but given there is only 24Mb of RAM here I'm guessing that this is an OLD sparc. The EPROM is probably easier to replace physically, I have no idea where you would buy a 2nd hand Sparc EPROM. I've always got mine direct from Sun under support. Also there is no guarentee that this is the underlying problem, though one would hope that you couldn't get much more underlying than a POST failure.

There are all sorts of diagnostics in the later Sun POSTs, but given the age of your system, I dunno. Unfortunately the POST diag stuff is particularly under-documented, to ensure Sun Engineer call-out figures stay high I assume.

In your situation, I would look at how much I paid for the system compared with engineer callout prices in you part of the world. You could try to find a replacement EPROM, but for this age machine it could be tricky.

Sorry. Ian

"IF" is not a word it's a way of life

 

[solarisadmin]

I've never come across this problem. Looks like you've to upgrade you EEPROM.But When you get the error msg type n to get the ok prompt. Then boot. If your boot disk is not the default one (disk 0) issue the command boot disk ( for ex boot disk1 or boot c0t1d0s0 an so on). Let's know if it works.

 

[TheOtherKiwi]

I've seen this on my old Sparc 2, it was serviced by the local Sun dudes and after replacing the EEPROM contents was just fine, still running now...Note: even if you can fool the machine into loading the OS from CD it will not boot unless you have this problem fixed, so look so further.