SUMMARY: [Q] Replace EPROM on SUN SPARC 1000E?

From: Duffy Men (duffy@cais.com)
Date: Mon Apr 27 1998 - 13:12:49 CDT


Thank you fro so many people give me the answer. Some people said very easy
, but some said NOT easy and need special tools. I decide to call SUN engineer
come to our office to replace it.

My original post:
> Base on SUN document, SPARC Server 1000E need replace EPROM (P/N
> 560-1962-07) to fix Y2K problem. We have SUN Silver level maintainance
> contract. base on this contract SUN engineer can only come to our office
> from 8-5. The problem is this server is ORACLE production database
> server, we can NOT shutdown at business day. Does anyone replace this
> part before? Is it easy for me to replace ?
>
> Thank you for help.

========= The following answer from Adam =======

Well as I suspected it was pretty straight forward and I or you easily
could have done it ourselves. =20

The sun tech did have a printout of the physical layout of the
motherboard and so knew that the four PROM chips of each cpu board
were under one of the cpu card. Actually it may have been the cache
card as with metal sinks they look identical. But all you need is to
recall the physical position and the layout is very simple. Once you
have pulled out the board (with static wrist protector) and have the
board in front of you, with the cable connector (external) edge facing
you, then on your left is one CPU board and behind it is the cache (or
vice versa). Regardless of which is which you can easily tell it is
not the one farthest from you as there is a hollow space that card and
the underlying motherboard. Instead you have to remove the card
nearest you and there are the four PROM chips.

The PROM chips are numbered uniquely - the part number is the same up
to the last two digits, I think the last two digits ran from 26-29.
However all you have to do is look at the chips that are currently on
the board, get the replacement chip with the same number and replace
one at a time so you don't confuse the order. He simply used a thin
flatblade screw driver to rock the chip up first a little on one end,
the the other, then back, and so forth. Getting them out was pretty
easy.

Getting them in was a bit of a physical problem. Several of the
chips's legs seemed poorly made such that the tech had a very hard
time wheedling/rocking them into the sockets. He had to lay some of
the chips on their lengthwise sides and push gently so the legs would
curve/bend inwards a little. And even then he put one in without
seeing he had bent a leg. So upon boot up the machine stayed with the
middle light in amber - frozen - upon boot up. Removing the board, we
found the bent leg and got *really* lucky as he was able to straighten
it without it's breaking from metal fatigue. =20

Apart from that snafu, once he popped the two cpu boards back in, the
machine came up and we had our Y2K compliancy and support for the
100baseT SCSI/Ethernet card that we had installed at the same time.

I think you could just get the PROMs free from Sun and then do it
yourself, but if you have a service contract you can go that way to:
depends upon your desire to do things yourself.



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