I picked up a “new” (new old stock most likely since I don’t think these chips are still manufactured, and haven’t been for 10+ years) NVRAM timekeeper chip since the one in the Sun Ultra 60 I picked up cheap on ebay was dead. Luckily it seems to still have charge and is keeping the host id and mac address values between power off/on, so that’s great.
To reprogram the hostid and mac address that are stored in the NVRAM memory, following the guide here which seems to be the definite source for reprogramming Sun NVRAMs, I used the following steps to reconfigure the new chip. The value of 80 on line 2 is the machine type for Ultra models:
1 0 mkp
80 1 mkp
8 2 mkp
0 3 mkp
20 4 mkp
c0 5 mkp
ff 6 mkp
ee 7 mkp
0 8 mkp
0 9 mkp
0 a mkp
0 b mkp
c0 c mkp
ff d mkp
ee e mkp
0 f 0 do i idprom@ xor loop f mkp
The odd thing now is I’m running into this issue that I didn’t see before:
I’m not going to type in all this text so it’s searchable, but here’s the text for almost the same error (same issue, different version of Solaris perhaps?) :
Hardware watchdog enabled svc.configd: smf(5) database integrity check of:
/etc/svc/repository.db
failed. The database might be damaged or a media error might have prevented it from being verified. Additional information useful to your service provider is in:
/etc/svc/volatile/db_errors
The system will not be able to boot until you have restored a working database. svc.startd(1M) will provide a sulogin(1M) prompt for recovery purposes. The command:
/lib/svc/bin/restore_repository
can be run to restore a backup version of your repository. See
http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-MY for more information.
Requesting System Maintenance Mode
svc.configd exited with status 102 (database initialization failure)
If I could get to a single user logon prompt then I could follow these instructions to repair, but the above error is just looping continuously, so I’m unable to do the repair.
When I first installed Solaris 10 from CDs, I got through the first couple of disks and then the cd drive would just eject any disk inserted, and won’t stay closed. I managed to complete the install by copying across ISO disk images and completing the install from those.
Since I can’t get a physical install cd to stay in the drive, I’m not sure I can boot recovery, so I’m kinda stuck. I think it’s time to pick up a replacement cdrom drive (might as well get a dvd drive) otherwise I’m kinda stuck in the water with this machine at this point.
