cdr@decwrl.dec.com (Carl Rigney) (05/17/89)
Summary: Sun 4/280 with 451 and 7053 controllers will boot from miniroot but not from A partition. I have a Sun 4/280 running SunOS 4.0 with 32MB memory, a 451 disk controller with 2 Hitachi 892MB drives on it, a Xylogics 6250bpi tape drive, and a vt320 on the ttya port as console. Last Saturday Sun moved the 2 892MB disks to a 7053 (SMD-4) controller (and formatted them) and put two Fujitsu Eagles on the 451 controller (and formatted them). They also installed a high-res monochrome monitor as console, and took the vt320 off. I installed the Sun "Feature Tape" for the SMD-4 and configured a new kernel. I can boot the standard kernel that comes with the sun distribution tape from the miniroot on xy0b or xd0b (the Eagle or the Hitachi, respectively), and I can boot our new kernel from either. If I try to boot either kernel from the A partition of xd0a or xy0a, it hangs just after printing where root on... swap on... dumps on... and flashing the keyboard lights - it does this for both "swap generic" and "root on xd0a swap on xd0b" configurations. Oddly enough, for a "root on xd0a swap on xd0b dumps on xd1b" it still prints out that it's dumping to xd1b. I've left it hung for more than an hour and it doesn't do anything more. When booting the miniroot or modified miniroot only a few seconds pass between the "dumping on" message and the single-user prompt. In all versions, it recognizes all controllers and devices. When it's hung, an L1-A and G0 from the console cause a panic: zero & syncing disks, so we believe the kernel is running, but isn't seeing the monitor. The eeprom 0x16 was set to 00 (1280x900 Monitor) so I set it to 0x13 (1600x1280) since I have a high-res monitor. It still hangs. I reattached our vt320 to ttya and changed 0x1F to 10 to use that as console, and it still had the same problem. I can newfs & mount any of the disk partitions, so we're currently running multi-user off of a modified mini-root, but our boot sequence is more painful than I'd like. Does anyone out there have any suggestions for what may be wrong? Sun software support says its a hardware bug; hardware says its a software bug. I suspect I may just have some small thing set wrong - has anyone else run into a problem booting from the A partition with a 7053 & 451 controller on a Sun 4/280? I'm leaving for a two week vacation Monday and would feel a lot better if the system were fixed by then - it's working now but requires manual intervention to reboot. I realize sun-spots doesn't have that fast a turnaround time, but its still probably faster than Sun service. :-( Until 5/12/89 please call Janet Patton at 408-749-2678 or 800-538-8450 x42678 or email to janet@amdcad.amd.com and cdr@amdcad.amd.com. After then, please call Carl Rigney 408-749-2453 or 800-538-8450 x42453 or send mail to cdr@amdcad.amd.com. Janet Patton System Administrator, 29k Product Support janet@amdcad.AMD.COM {ames decwrl gatech pyramid sun uunet}!amdcad!janet