will@genbank.bio.net (Will Nelson) (07/24/90)
I have a problem that SUN Tech Support is flailing with, so I thought I would draw on the Net's collective experience to see if we can figure out what is going on. I want to upgrade my SPARCstation 1 (SUN 4/60) to SUN OS 4.1. The problem is that I want to format my disk, and I can't get into the menu that would allow me to do this. The system has no internal drives and no floppy drive. It has three external SCSI shoeboxes, one with a magnetic drive, one with a 1/4" SCSI cartridge tape drive (Emulex driver), and an erasable optical disk drive. All have LUN 0. The magnetic drive is jumpered as SCSI target 0, but is recognized as sd3. The cartridge tape is jumpered as SCSI target 4. The optical drive is jumpered as SCSI target 1. Only the last device in the daisy chain, the optical drive, is terminated. I do b st() from the > prompt and get the boot prompt. I then st(0,0,4) -sw and it reads the munix kernel off of cartridge tape, loads the kernel ok, probes the devices (ie, reads the label off of the magnetic disk), and then asks : Initialize ram disk from device (ft%d[a-h], fd%d[a-h], sd%d[a-h]) Note that it doesn't list the cartridge tape drive as a possibility. It was supposed to ask me What would you like to do? 1 - install SunOS mini-root 2 - exit to single user shell Enter a 1 or 2: The bottom line is that I am unable to format the SCSI magnetic disk. What it looks like to me is that the MUNIX doesn't have the SCSI tape driver in it. When it probes the devices, the st0 device is not listed. Yet the PROM was able to read from the SCSI cartridge tape. If I try to enter sd0 as the device to initialize the ram disk from, it doesn't recognize it as a valid device. I ran into this same problem when I loaded 4.0.3c from tape when I first got the system. Since the drive was already formatted and I was in a hurry to get the system up, I just went ahead and loaded the OS. But now I would really feel most comfortable re-formatting the drive with the 4.1 format program, and am curious to find out what is going wrong. I have been using the system for close to a year now with few problems, so I don't think it's some kind of cabling or termination problem. Will Nelson Internet: will@presto.ig.com Intelligenetics, Inc. Uucp: ames!ig.com!presto!will 700 East El Camino Real (415) 962-7363 Mountain View, CA 94040