Sun Hardware Problems 1

[agape234]

I have a SunFire V480 and a 280.
Neither shipped with graphics cards installed. I recieved 2 PGX32 cards and installed both.
The 280 came up fine no issues. the 480 has issues, with either the card or perhaps the card is bad.

Short of swapping the video cards between the servers how can I tell?

 

[mikeclark]

If you don't have another card then swapping cards is the easiest way to check if one is faulty.

 

[bpinos]

What is it doing/not doing??

 

[agape234]

I swapped out the cards with no change.
The V480 still comes up with a screen full of pastel colors across the whole field. Just before it kicks in the monitor shows some brief info, monitor is working, source # etc, and has a message that input freq is out of range. This is a sun monitor that works with my 280, it seems to be just the 480 platform that is of issue. Help?

 

[SamBones]

Check out this web page. It has some good info. It's helped me install these cards in other machines.

http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/805-7770-11/6j7acub26?a=view

Hope this helps.

 

[agape234]

Good info, but with that comes the obvious ??? The monitor works with my other Sun Platforms and I swapped the video cards. Why does this one not auto-detect like the smaller platforms?
My 220R and 240 both auto detected with the same cards. My V480 is bigger, better etc but won't auto-detect?

Puzzlement

 

[SamBones]

Yes, if that card and monitor work on other systems, then it is something on the v480. Maybe the drivers weren't installed when the OS went in.

If you can get to an [tt]ok[/tt] prompt, did you try something like...
[tt]
ok setenv output-device screen:r1024x768x75
ok reset
[/tt]
This should set it to a known good resolution.

Does it at least boot? Can you telnet to it from another machine? If so, I would try to set the resolution with the [tt]pgxconfig[/tt] command. Here's a page on how to use it...

http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/816-0211/6m6nc66rn?a=view

If you force it to use a lower resolution or refresh rate, it won't need to auto-sense.

Make sure you have the device driver for the PGX32 installed. It's package TSIpgx or TSIgfx. Do a...
[tt]
pkginfo | grep TSI
[/tt]
...and see if you have it installed? If not, you should be able to download the package from Sun or get it off the Solaris install CD.

Also, there may be patches required for that combination of machine, OS, and display card. Here's a page with patch requirements...

http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/retrieve.pl?doc=fsrdb/20238&zone_32=TSIpgx

Not sure what else to say.

Hope this helps.