Need hardware opinion SparcStation 4

[glover]

Hi all,
I've been asked to help someone replace their CD-ROM on a SparcStation 4 and also find an additional external hard drive in the 36-40 GB range.
I've worked only a little on Sun machines before - updrading OS and memory.
I know that Sun SparcStations can be picky about their SCSI CD-Rom's, etc., so I would appreciate any and all advice on what would be a good choice and where some of the better prices can be found.

Thanks,

B. Glover
glover@pa.msu.edu

 

[tuka]

The sparc 4 has room for one (1) internal hard drive.
If leaving the present disk installed then you would have to add an external disk with an enclosure. If replacing the internal disk with a new/larger disk then there are things to consider.

1. Presume you are running sunos. sunos require the root partition to be less than 2gb or 1gb. I will look that up.

2. The remaining space can be divided onto the remaining paritions.
3. A boot block will need to be written onto the new disk.

4. You will have to back up all the partitions and restore to the new disk partitions.

5. Depending on your hardware resources this can be accomplished by different methods.

CDROM
If the old cdrom is bad I would go out on the web and find an used cdrom for a sparc4, they are fairly cheap. PC and Sun boxes require different block sizes on their cdrom so this could cause a problem, dependent upon your experience level.

On an another listing you asked about S/W packages. Go to google and search for sun freeware.

 

[glover]

tuka,

Hello. Thank you for your advice. Luckily the additional hard drive will be an external one so that will make things a lot easier and I can avoid all of the wise steps above that you listed for internal drives. Would you have any reccommendations on which SCSI hard disks I should consider and where I should purchase it?

As for CD-ROM - you hit the nail on the head. Sun & Solaris are not my forte but I did hear about the problem with SparcStations using CD-ROM's that have a block size of 512 bits, while more modern CD-ROMs are 2048 bits. That's about the extent of my knowledge on that subject, which is why I came here. I was hoping someone might have dealt with this before and know of generally sucessful replacement CD-ROMs. Also, I think this person will insist on a new CD-ROM instead of a used one.

This is a Sun SparcStation 4 model 110 running Solaris 7. Thanks!

 

[tuka]

I have seen some CDROM that had a jumper to select the block
size. I will look tomorrow for cdrom and disks
I am leaving for the day will return at 0500 hrs on 1/18.
That is good about the external disk, that will be easy.


Talk to you tomorrow.

 

[tuka]

There is a web site

http://www.aball.de/~wpv/sun/faq/cdrom.html

This site has info concerning cdrom for Sun.

Earlier I was thinking the sparc 4 was a C ARCH. but it is a M architecture.

This site

http://www.solarsystem.com

has part and at the last company we ordered a lot of parts from them.

As far as scsi disk: seagate Fujitsu, toshiba