*BSD News Article 91591


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From: dhoelzer@gnu.ai.mit.edu (David Hoelzer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc
Subject: Sparc 1/1+  Net BSD 1.2 - HELP
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 04:15:20 GMT
Organization: LI Net (Long Island Network)
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Alrighty.. I'm neither new to the BSD or to the Sparc world.. but I've
got quite an interesting problem here.  I started with a Sparc 1 that
we had lying around.  It had been ploddingly running Solaris 2.5 for
quite sometime and I wanted to lighten it's load, so netBSD seemed a
likely candidate.  I've successfully installed the distribution (more
than once at this point, on more than one drive).  The system works
fine WHEN it boots up.  Half of the time the machine will get past the
SCSI probe, tell me about the framebuffer and then it dies and starts
looping the monitor prompt at me (Boot, N for new command, etc...).
Any ideas?

My first thought was that this seven year old dinosaur was just being
persnickety, so I dug up an SS1+ too.  It has a cgsix rather than a
cg3 (SS1).  This machine exhibits the same behavior.  When it feels
like booting, it will run for days.  But if it doesn't want to boot,
it just keeps looping that boot message after printing the framebuffer
type.

Any help would be appreciated.  It reminds me of the strange parity
errors that you would get with 3 chip SIMMS and of Watchdog Resets
under Solaris.