Re: installing NetBSD on a Sparcstation 2.

[Erik Fair <fair%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Jul 3, 2010, at 11:02, Dan Oglesby wrote:

> sun4c systems do support CD-ROM boot, but possibly not with all CD-ROM drives.

The magic for booting from CD-ROM drives on Suns is to get a drive that can do 
I/O in 512-byte blocks in addition to 2048-byte blocks (the default). Some 
drives can be strapped to do this with a configuration jumper or switch.

Any CD-ROM drive you intend to boot an old SPARCstation with will have to be 
SCSI rather than IDE/ATA interface. Make sure the SCSI bus is properly 
terminated, and set the CD-ROM drive's SCSI ID to 6; that's what Sun's firmware 
expects the drive ID to be. It is possible to boot a CD-ROM drive set at 
another ID, but you'll have to specify the OFW device as part of the boot 
command.

        Erik <fair%netbsd.org@localhost>