The collected works of Perkunas

Hey guys,

I tried to make this more human-readable, but this issue is driving me insane.

I'm finally setting up a Blade 150 I've had laying around for ages so I can finally have a real piece of SPARC hardware to play with. Everything seems to be going well but I've hit a snag.

I recently acquired an XVR-600 accelerator for it and I can't get it to boot a Solaris 10 DVD no matter what I try. It's definitely the card causing the issue, as everything installed fine when I pulled it out. The same problem resumes if I put it back in and it hangs after the copyright (although this could possibly be driver-related as well?)

The installation guide doesn't seem to have any warnings or particular steps to take with my system and after googling around over the last couple days, this doesn't seem to be a common problem. I've also tried booting the system with the -v option but unfortunately when I enter the monitor while running the accelerator it for some reason only uses one line for output so I can't actually read any of the information.

I think my last option at this point is to try Solaris 9 or some other operating system (maybe I should anyway, though it's run just fine in the past on my 100), is there anything else I can do? I'm really hoping I don't have to try and return the card.

Thanks for reading!

uunix wrote: I think the 600 is compatible with the later 1.2MHz CPUs and it would be the XVR500 you would need.

That's weird, everything I looked before I grabbed it listed the 600 as compatible with the 150, which as far as I'm aware only clocks up to 650 MHz (the model I have) and has no CPU upgrade options, at least from a bit of cursory searching.

On another note, I tried booting Solaris 9 on it to see if it would give me anything, but still nothing. However with a verbose boot I only see this before the optical drive stops accessing the disk:



I'm starting to feel like I'm in way over my head

Well, both the 150's and the XVR-600's pages stated the Blade 150 as the lowest-spec system they ran on. However...

While my 150 left the factory in 2004, the board itself seems to be from mid-2002 judging by the date codes. A final shot in the dark before I contact MemoryX and see if I can get a return and swap out for a 500, but is it possible that I might need to update OpenBoot?

uunix wrote: BTW, welcome to the forum.

Thanks, and I appreciate the help!

OpenBoot is up to date and I think I'll just pack up the card and maybe ship it back, I've tried everything I can think of at this point and either Sun was flat-out lying or the card is defective.

I noticed where it halts on boot is usually where the screen flickers briefly when it's running on the integrated chip, but I'm not really sure what to make of this. Oh well.

I had the seller send me a replacement that they even tested on a similarly configured 150 (so it's definitely not a matter of support, and the links in one of my posts further up corroborate this since Sun added support for it around April 2004 IIRC) they had on-site and it still hangs, I guess this box is just messed up, it also wouldn't output video at all when I put in a known good/fully supported SCSI card in it.

I guess I'll just have to save the cards to wait it out and see if another 150 or 1500/2500 ever comes around at a price I'm willing to pay.