SUMMARY: Trouble Booting from Ext. Disk

From: James Kwong (kwong@zeta.acast.nova.edu)
Date: Fri May 16 1997 - 13:11:01 CDT


Thanks for all who responded:

Barry Brown <bbrown@dottie.sna.com>
Craig Gates <cgates@fnoc.navy.mil>
Steve Butterfield <steve.butterfield@pcs.co.uk>
Birger A. Wathne <birger@Vest.Skrivervik.No>
Andrew Moffat <amof@subaru1.com>

Original question:

>Got an old SS1+ Rom Rev. 1.3 (sun4c) with the following disks allocation:
> - 2 99MB internal disks with SCSI# 1 and 3 and a
> - 1 1GB external disk on SCSI# 2 (setup as the boot drive).
>After I installed 2.5 on it and do a 'cold boot', the external disk drive
>has no response, it just stuck there with a message "booting from: sd(0,2,0)"
>No response at all. If I boot from CDROM and do some disk activities on
>that external drive (like mount or fsck) and then reboot, it spins up alright.
>Searched through Sunsolve with keyword "external disk" and found SRDB ID: 5379
>saying external 424MB scsi drive does not boot with targets 0 or 2 on
>SUNOS 4.1.1.
>Q1. Does this also apply to a 1GB external disk drive on a Solaris 2.5
> machine?
>Q2. If not, what should I try next? Should I set those 99MB internal disk
> drives as the boot drive instead?

Solution:

Almost everyone pointed out there's a jumper on the disk drive board
that will automatically spin up when power-on. I looked up the
disk manual and the factory default have it set to 'disable spin'.
So, I opened up the external 'lunchbox' cover and took the jumper
out, which is 'enable spin' (jumper 'E5' on a Conner 1.05GB disk drive).
Then, the ext. disk drive cold-booted up without any problem.

Thanks!!!

-- James.

+------------------------------------+------------------------------------+
| Unix System Administrator | James Kwong |
| Office of Information Technologies | kwong@zeta.acast.nova.edu |
| Nova Southeastern University | |
+------------------------------------+------------------------------------+



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