Recently, I picked up a SparcSTATION Classic to play with. It arrived
with a humble configuration of 16/400. As a test, I installed a base
load of 1.6 from CD and it installed and appeared to run with no
problems.

Since my plan was to take the Classic to the unsupported configuration
of 128mb of RAM, I purchased 2 32mb parity SIMMS (8x36, 60ns) from eBay
and installed them along with the original 16mb of RAM. This gave me
80mb of RAM which appeared to work fine with the previous minimal 1.6
installation.

Next, I installed a 4GB Seagate drive and went to reinstall 1.6 on the
new drive. Everything went fine until the package installation when it
dumped core after installing several packages. A subsequent attempt to
install a more minimal set of packages also died similarly.

At first blush, it appears that I'm introduced some kind of instability
into my system, either with the RAM or with the SCSI drive. Before I go
tearing the box apart, though, I'm wondering if this sounds familiar to
anyone and whether anyone has any advice? 

Specifically, a couple of quick questions about the Classic:

1) Anyone else using 32mb SIMMS in the first bank? Any reason they won't
work with the 4mb SIMMS?
2) Does the internal drive need to be terminated? It currently is not.
(My experience is with the SS2 which isn't and with the SS20 where it is
automatic.)
3) Any known things to check for which might introduce random core dumps
from the installer? (This sounds like another recent thread, but that
was on an SS2, as I recall.)

thanks...
<<<john>>>