E250: boot from CD hangs

[PilotMike]

Hey all.

Could use some ideas here. I'm repurposing an old E250, starting with installing a fresh copy of OS 8. I've set auto-boot to false and have an OS 8 CD in the tray. When I try "boot cdrom - w" it hangs after the 'please wait' animation spins a few times:

{0} ok boot cdrom - w
Boot device: /pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/disk@6,0:f File and args: - w
SunOS Release 5.8 Version Generic_108528-13 64-bit
Copyright 1983-2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
-

Have tried with an OS 9 CD as well. Same results.

I've reset NVRAM defaults. 4 disks are in the bays (old mirrors from a past system). Here is some version info:

Sun (TM) Enterprise 250 (2 X UltraSPARC-II 296MHz), No Keyboard
OpenBoot 3.7, 512 MB memory installed, Serial #xxxxxxxx.
Ethernet address 8:0:20:a6:69:58, Host ID: 80a66958.

{0} ok .version
Release 3.7 Version 7 created 1998/06/17 16:06
OBP 3.7.7 1998/06/17 16:06
POST 6.0.4 1998/06/01 17:49
OBDIAG 3.19.1 1998/06/09 10:12

So, OBP seems a little old. Maybe I need to flash that up?
Any ideas on where to start troubleshooting?
Thanks!

 

[cndcadams]

PilotMike;

What is the -w for? I have never used that option before.

Have you tried just doing a boot cdrom inorder to do the install?

If you have tried boot cdrom what happens?

Have you tried boot cdrom -s to make sure the system can boot to single user off the cd?

I looked and there is no minimum OBP for the 300mhz cpu on the E250 so you should be good there.

If you are able to boot the cdrom -s then the hardware is generally ok.

Thanks

CA

 

[PilotMike]

Thanks for the input, CA.

I couldn't think of anything else except that I was on a laptop which was logged into another server where I was tip'ping to this new one. I figured I'd pull all of that out of the equation and attached a Wyse directly to the new server.

Of course it worked fine then. Go figure.

Issue resolved.


#mikec