According to Eric Kolotyluk <eric@sfu.ca>:
> DoN. Nichols wrote:
> > According to Eric Kolotyluk <eric@sfu.ca>:
> >> I've been having a lot of trouble getting my (old) Ultra 5 to boot.
> >>
> >> I've connected a terminal emulator to serial port a on my Sun and run
> >> the Power On Self Test (POST) several times and it never fails, even
> >> with dial-level max.
> >>
> >> The trouble seems to happen after the reset or power-on
[ ... ]
> > Hmm ... nothing in bank 0, and two simms in bank 2? What if you
> > move them to the other sockets? The system may be expecting SIMMs in
> > bank 0.
>
> The sims are in their original factory positions and have worked fine
> there for over 5 years.
I see from another branch of the thread that you got it working
by pulling the Intel CPU card from the PCI bus.
[ ... ]
> > So -- it does boot sometimes?
>
> Yes, it boots sometimes, but it's getting harder to boot now. I only got
> a serial cable for ttya a couple of days ago, so until now it was a
> 'real' mystery why it wouldn't boot. I've event tried booting from the
> cdrom and it gives me exactly the same problem.
Which suggests that whatever it is, it is not the OS or disk
contents that's the problem.
[ ... ]
> > BTW What is in the PCI slots in the machine? You seem to have an error
> > associated with one or more of the slots.
>
> I've got a PC board (i.e., personal computer) for running windows in one
> slot, and it's daughter card in another slot, then a SCSI and Ethernet
> controller in the last slot.
And -- it turned out to be the PC card. Hmm ... does that card
have a battery on it? If so, it may be getting old and weak.
> >> Any help or advice would be appreciated.
> >
> > Just guesses above.
> >
> > BTW The Ultra 5 machines are now so inexpensive, that getting a
> > second machine to swap parts with might be the most
> > cost-effective diagnostic tool.
>
> Hmmm, I never thought about that. Maybe I should give my old friends at
> the local Sun office a call.
I don't know that you can get them from Sun at any reasonable
price (other than a possible give-away), but I've gotten mine from a
hamfest almost exactly a year ago. It was all of $20.00. (And I
immediately set aside the disk which was in in, and installed an 80GB IDE
drive to replace it. And I installed Solaris 10 from DVD. (I also
replaced the CD-ROM drive with an IDE DVD burner.)
Good Luck,
DoN.
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