On Fri, Jan 12, 2001 at 12:12:00PM -0500, Pat Wendorf wrote:
> Hey Jon,
> 
> I found out my Sparc 1+ NVRAM is dead yesterday too!  What a coincidence
> :)
> 
> I took the dangerous/stupid way to solve the problem in the NVRAM faq,
> and scraped away some filler on the side of the chip to expose some
> contacts and hooked up a 3v battery pack to it (2 duracell AA batteries
> in a plastic casing which came from a logitech mouse box with a blinking
> light). They recommend against it for many reasons, but my thoughts
> were: "It's dead... I can't possibly hurt it" :)  The worst part is the
> soldering... I had to get my electronics friend to come over, just
> because he has a more steady hand than I do.  The procedure was totally
> successful.  I've left my Sparc 1+ off overnight and this morning when I
> turned it on, all the NVRAM values were still there.

I did something like this for my IPC too. The only problem is that I first
hacked the bad side of the chip, so now the clock doens't run any more (well
it runs while the kernel run, but stops when you halt it).
But with a rdate at boot this isn't so much a problem :)

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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