On 28-Nov-00 Charles Fultz wrote:
>> Try booting the machine, and when you get to the "keyboard" icon, or right
>> before it says "boot" hit "1".  If that does nothing.. reboot, and try all
>> 10
>> digits.  5 should drop you into the SMS menu..  I think 8 or 1 on
>> some machines drops you into OFW.  
> 
> I'm not certain if this machine has OpenFirmware.  When the machine
> boots up pressing the F1 key prompts for the System Management Services 
> disk, which I give to it and then it goes into the graphical SMS mode.
> What do you want me to do once I'm in it?  I can do the same things in it
> that I could do in the text-based SMS.

Duh..  I use physical consoles on AIX so rarely I forgot.. the function keys
give the different menus..

Try all 10 different function keys and see if any drop you to an OFW prompt. 
F8 or just "8" would be my guess..

You can also netboot prep, by doing the following:

put this in your /etc/bootptab:
botein:\
:sm=255.255.255.0:ht=ethernet:ha=0060949DCDE2:\
:gw=192.168.10.11:ip=192.168.10.24:bf=boot.fs:rp=/prep/prep/root

Obviously substituting the hardware and other addresses for the correct one. 
The bf, boot.fs, is the same image you should dd onto a floppy.  Since you seem
to be having trouble using a serial console of any kind.. (bizzare), get the
non-com0 floppy, put it in /tftpboot, start up bootp, and enable tftpd in
/etc/inetd.conf, and see what happens when you tell the machine to boot off the
network.

---
Tim Rightnour <root@garbled.net>
NetBSD: Free multi-architecture OS http://www.netbsd.org/
NetBSD supported hardware database: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/hw.cgi