"Peter W Waterland" <mmmckpww@stud.man.ac.uk> wrote:

|> Hi there :) I am new to sparcs maybe someone can 

Read around on http://www.sunhelp.org/

|> however..when i try 'boot disk' or 'boot 
|> disk0/1/2/3' or boot /sbus/esp/sd@3,0 or 0,0 or 
                                     ^ this ^ is the drive's SCSI ID

Generally you'd be best off if you (at least in the beginning) follow
the Sun-ish tradition of having disks at ID 0-3, tapes at ID 4-5, CD
at ID 6. Many old Sparcs like the IPC have the aliases disk{0,1,2,3}
set to ID 3,1,2,0 respectively for reasons not really worth knowing.

|> a few other wild stabs in the dark i get:
|> 
|> boot device: /sbus/esp@0,800000/sd@3,0 file and args: bsd
|> scsi device 3,0 is not responding 

Well if your drive is at ID 5, it won't respond to requests for ID 3.

|> sparc. The ID on the hdd can be changed by 
|> jumpers as far as i can see..altering it from 
|> 0/1/2 just seems to move the buggering target 
|> around on 'probe-scsi' and dmesg.

This is actually what you need to do. ID are 0 to 7, the jumpers are
binary digits, 0 being 2^0, 1 being 2^1, 2 being 2^2.

Try setting your drive's ID to 1 (only jumper 0) and "boot disk1".
(Why 1, not 0? To stay clear of the 3<->0 remapping mentioned above.)