If you are in a big hurry and/or don't have any money for a new eeprom you
can carefullly graft a new battery onto the existing eeprom and use the
Sun NVRAM faq to recode your settings into it.

I've seen this suggested several times but I actually DID replace the batt
on mine.  You have to CAREFULLY expose the leads and solder the new batt
to them.  It works and will completely and forever rejuvinate it as you
can allways replace the batt again very quickly.

As for booting, I'd break the scsi drive out of the machine, hang it on my
PC and use linux/bsd/whatever's DD command to transfer a netbsd boot image
to it.  I've had trouble with my sun4 and the Miniroot for netbsd so use
the Floppyfs image instead.

Your machine might not have the OpenProm's friendly scheme.  Mine doesn't. 
To boot then, you would "b sd(0,18,0)" or something to that effect.  The
first number is the scsi controller ".  The second is the scsi device id
in hex.  The third is the partition number to boot from.

Regards,

Jeff

In <200111011607.fA1G7IH06977@node174f9.a2000.nl>, on 11/01/01 
   at 05:07 PM, Paul Boven <p.boven@chello.nl> said:

>Hi Hasan,

>With the floppy drive not running, the best thing you could do is to set
>up an install server for NetBSD: basically this means a unix box (any
>flavour will do) with TFTP, RARP, bootparamd and NFS. Also see the
>'diskless' entry on the NetBSD website. Furthermore, you will need to fix
>the CMOS chip, so it will remember things like it's ethernet ID. There
>are several companies that sell these chips, new. Once you have obtained
>one, see 
>http://www.squirrel.com/squirrel/sun-nvram-hostid.faq.html
>which will tell you how to put sensible information back into a new PROM,
>or one suffering from amnesia.

>Regards, Paul Boven.

>> Ladies/Gents:
>> 	I have received a Sparc IPC that I'd like to make into a router using
>> NetBSD. The machine has one hard drive with SunOS 4 on it. The CMOS battery is
>> dead (as witnessed by the Mac address being FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF on bootup). The
>> floppy drive doesn't work. 
>> 	SunOS 4 has /usr mounted from a second drive (which is inconspiciously
>> missing from the machine) -- therefore there is no way to boot into the OS
>> normally. I suppose I could get it to boot single-user mode, but I don't know
>> enough about SunOS 4 to do so (boot -s doesn't seem to have any effect). 
>> 	My question is: Is there any hope of getting NetBSD (or a similarly
>> advanced OS) onto the box or am I stuck with it? Thanks for the help!
>> - --
>> Hasan =)



-- 
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Jeffrey S. Worley
Asheville, NC USA
828-6984887
UberTechnoid@Home.com
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