Unable to boot Solaris from external scsi cd drive on a Sun Blade 150

[tonata]

I am trying to boot Solaris 8 from external scsi CD-ROM drive Yamaha 8/8/24 on a Sun blade 150 through Open Boot. Its scsi ID is set to 6.
I can not boot from IDE and the nvram is invalid. The battery is dead.

probe-scsi-all reports that the CD drive is at:

/pci@1f,0/pci@5/scsi@1 target 6, unit 0.

It also says its an Yamaha drive, so there is a communication with the CD drive.

So I am trying to boot with this command:

boot /pci@1f,0/pci@5/scsi@1/disk@6,0

But it just halts until I switch off the external scsi CD drive. Then it fails with an error. The CD drive does not give any read indication during the entire time. The Solaris cd and the CD drive are OK I think, I only have some doubts about the scsi cable.

Is this the correct command to boot in my case? Maybe the Yamaha is not compatible with the Sun hardware?

 

[Timo W.]

You need a drive that supports a sector size of 512 bytes. The Yamaha 8/8/24 does not support that. Even drives that do require a jumper to be set to operate in that mode.

I would suggest using the internal IDE CD-ROM or trying a newer version of Solaris. At one point, it no longer needed 512-byte support to boot.

 

[tonata]

Thank you.
I am having problems with the IDE controller as I have explained here: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/problem-with-ide-controller-on-sun-blade-150.1249846/
So I am trying with scsi now. If a SCSI CD drive is not an option, because I do not have a compatible one then I want to use https://fr.aliexpress.com/item/32884185524.html (SCSI to IDE) in order to attach both an IDE CD-drive and an IDE disk through the SCSI controller. I tried this card on a SGI machine with an IDE HDD and it worked.

 

[legodude]

That adapter is not SCSI-IDE. It converts SCSI 50/68 pin to SCA. Since you already have a SCSI card for your Blade, you may consider a ZuluSCSI or PiSCSI. I use them exclusively instead of actual CDROMs.

 

[tokenalt]

So I am trying to boot with this command:

boot /pci@1f,0/pci@5/scsi@1/disk@6,0

But it just halts until I switch off the external scsi CD drive. Then it fails with an error. The CD drive does not give any read indication during the entire time. The Solaris cd and the CD drive are OK I think, I only have some doubts about the scsi cable.

Is this the correct command to boot in my case? Maybe the Yamaha is not compatible with the Sun hardware?

You have to specify the partition to use. I think it's f. You can just check what the system uses with devalias to see what the cdrom alias has. So the command should be something like this.

boot /path/disk@6,0:f

 

[tonata]

Here it is written more about this 512 byte problem: https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-2730-post-19058.html#pid19058

 

[Bob-O-Rama]

Well, there are a lot of Yamaha 8824 models, but CRW-8824S I have has a jumper for block size. I don't have access to it at the moment, but IIRC its the right most jumper next to the SCSI connector. If its in an enclosure, you can pop it open and see the settings. By default the jumper would be absent, when installed the block size is 512 bytes.

 

[tonata]

That is a great idea! I did not think looking inside of it. Here are some photos of the SCSI card and the Yamaha CD drive.
How do I open the enclosure? There is something to push on top of it, but I do not understand what should I do next. It is on the last photo middle left.

 

[Bob-O-Rama]

Not sure, but maybe there are screws under the footpads, or press to open latches somewhere. But since that is the model of drive, you can change the block size once you get it open. I found this in the CRW-8824S manual ... once set to 512 you can leave it there. It will only slow down the drive a bit when writing / reading.

 

[tonata]

Wow! It did work!
I added the jumper on the Yamaha inside the closure and I booted with:

boot /pci@1f,0/pci@5/scsi@1/disk@6,0:f

where /pci@1f,0/pci@5/scsi@1 is the path to my SCSI pci card, 6 is SCSI ID set on the SCSI enclosure/drive, 0 is the unit and f should be the partition to boot from. Without "f" it complained that there was nothing to execute.
Thank you!!!!!

 

[tonata]

Can I use BlueSCSI to emulate a hard disk on my scsi controller?
I can use the above converter from 68 to 50 (https://fr.aliexpress.com/item/32884185524.html) pins and then try to attach a 50 pins BlueSCSI.

 

[tokenalt]

You can use a bluescsi or zuluscsi with it but performance would probably feel lackluster. They both max out at 10MB/s best case but that machine came out when ATA133 was common. Also that adapter does not seem to terminate the high byte which might cause problems with your scsi card.