[Suns-at-Home] 11 quid E450 not surprisingly wont boot..

[Julie Baumler]

I've seen similar behavior in E450's before and it turned out to be a bug 
whose fix was supposed to come out with Solaris 10.  We never got to 
upgrading those machines while I was there, so I don't know.  But as I 
recall, the workaround is to turn off autoboot, power on, give all the 
drives plenty of time to spin up, make sure all the green lights are on 
and then boot.  Basically, the OS goes looking for disks faster than they 
are available to it.

Also, E450's are particularly picky about being properly grounded and 
having a fairly stable environment.  We had a problem with machine room 
humiddity control that led to major biannual shifts in humiity - there was 
about a 50% chance that any given E450 would crash in the week or two 
following the shift.  HVAC finally got on top of the humidity issue and 
boom - stable E450's.

Julie

On Sun, 16 Mar 2008, Angus Fox wrote:

> I scored an E450 with 4GB 1x 400MHz and 20 drives on ebay for eleven pounds 
> GBP. (now thats depreciation!)
>
> Of course it doesnt boot (yet) - but it nearly does.
>
> Id like to get it going rather than cannibalise it.. Plenty of cheap E450 
> parts on ebay means that theres no limit to what can be replaced..
>
> I couldnt resist it - full of drives :-)
>
> All Power is green, the key mechanism works.
>
> OBP loads, I can see the hostid and Sun banner, It displays memory (it seems 
> to think 2GB now) it gets as far as the initialising | which doesnt turn and 
> it just hangs there forever.
>
> I tried the diagnostic boot, same thing. I tried breaking into NVRAM and can 
> get to an OK prompt and lots of drives show up :-) but from there on Im not 
> sure.
>
> I am planning to take all the memory out and boards and drives out and slowly 
> rebuild it checking if it boots each time. That way I can isolate the defect.
>
> Im sad to say I dont know a lot about this class of machine, being an Ultra 
> 10 sort of person. If anyone has the time to send me links to places of 
> interest or indeed immediatley knows the likely troubleshooting steps please 
> feel free to email me directly and I will summarize.
>
> thanks
>
> Angus
>