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welp, how'd i get into THIS situation? let's rewind...
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it's going to need a little work but WHAT is that blob of duct tape
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on the back, we have the usual semi-cursed 13W3 video connector and the Sun keyboard connector. where am i going to find a Sun keyboard?
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i just happen to have one, new in box! i bought this years ago at Weird Stuff Warehouse when they were still around. i have no idea why, but i'm glad i did.
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however, they have RJ11 connectors and the keyboard (which is where the mouse plugs in) just has a mini-DIN connector. uh oh.
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which brings me back to here. does this mouse, despite the connector difference, use the same protocol?
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looks like it is essentially the same protocol as the version of the mouse (type 4?) designed for the SPARCstation. the output is open collector, inverted async serial, 5 byte.
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time to build an adapter. the connector is RJ11 (technically 6P4C) but it has these pins sticking out, presumably so you can't plug it into a phone jack.
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couldn't find a Sun 13W3 cable adapter so I'm doing this to get to VGA.
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four months later :blobsweats: i made the Video Snake Oil board that can adapt 13W3 (any type!) to VGA. you just wire up the little pads to whatever your machine needs.
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i've also installed a ZuluSCSI. this neat little board is a lot cheaper than a SCSI2SD. i'm going to try and install Solaris using a CDROM ISO file. CD6_512.iso is placed on the SD card. it'll be ID 6, 512 bytes per sector.
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well, it tries to boot from the CDROM but suffers a BAD TRAP. not sure why, maybe i need to update the IDPROM contents.
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yeah i am guessing the machine type in the IDPROM is invalid so the installer runs the wrong code.
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wrote a little FORTH program to update the contents of the IDPROM, and it looks like it has a valid host id now.
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forgot to add that i needed to do a "set-defaults" and a "setenv diag-switch? false"
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uh oh, RAM parity error. i'm hoping U676 isn't seated all the way and that it is an easy fix.
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that did the trick. the SIMM sockets were very stuck. welcome to S O L A R I S!
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spoke too soon. another parity error, this time at U677. why there? because that's where i moved the module that was at U676. think i will just pull that bank of RAM for now.
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it seems to run with 12MB RAM. no more parity errors this time. but now the installer hates my SCSI drive (a ZuluSCSI).

filesystem creation failed for / 🤔

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i bet it is this issue. basically the ZuluSCSI returns values for disk geometry that somehow confuses the Solaris partition tool. one solution is to use a real SCSI hard drive and then dd it over to the ZuluSCSI once the install is completed.

github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-f…


Has anyone used ZuluSCSI on a SPARCStation? · ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware · Discussion #122

Hiya, I've got my ZuluSCSI installed in a sparcstation 2 and while it's definitely working...something is amiss. I can boot from CD image and Solaris 2.7 sees the hard drive image but I've having s...
GitHub
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zululog.txt has the smoking gun:

[996859ms] WARNING: Host used command 0x1A which is affected by drive geometry. Current settings are 63 sectors x 255 heads = 16065 but image size of 2097152 sectors is not divisible. This can cause error messages in diagnostics tools.

i think the solution here is to resize the disk image file so it is divisible by 63*255*512.

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that wasn't the solution lol :blobsweats: there's no more zululog.txt error but the superblock isn't getting written correctly. 6D B6 DB 6D is the test pattern written by the format command. could be somehow corrupting it during the write?
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well, I broke down and put in a spinning rust disk. the installer is much happier now and is copying files.
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spinning rust refuses to boot when the SCSI ID is set to 0. I can set it to 1 and it will boot partway but the fstab is configured for 0 so it won't work.
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I imaged the drive using the ZuluSCSI initiator mode, but even with the ZuluSCSI the firmware refuses to boot from SCSI ID0. weird.
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so i tried placing a drive image at SCSI ID 3 and *it boots as SD(0,0,0)vmunix* wtaf lol. seems like Sun cheated and swizzled some SCSI IDs around.
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anyway. trying an older Solaris installer and it is really surprised at the date -- could it really be 10,405 days after 1995?
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SunOS 4.1.4 says it can't possibly be the year 2023: "WARNING: preposterous time in filesystem -- CHECK AND RESET THE DATE!"

sorry SunOS, there's nothing i can do to fix 2023.

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