(2002.01.25)
Please bear in mind the fact that although I have been dealing in a vague way with UNIX machines since maybe 1985, and have (in other lifetimes) been a Computer Professional of several sorts, I've never particularly done much System Administration. This is going to lead us to some moderately odd places; please bear with me.
I went up to Debian and took a look around. I eventually found some stuff about the SPARC release, and finally even discovered instructions on installing it. This takes a bit of doing, but the information is (mostly) there.
If you want to start with floppies you can, but they are kind enough to warn you that the rescue floppy, which is the first one you need, is difficult to make. It doesn't have any error correction, so the whole thing has to be exactly right, and 100% readable. (The same is true of the boot floppy, which is the second one you need.)
I proceeded to try to make a rescue floppy, by two methods. The first involves Apple's Disk Copy program (I'm on a Mac here), and the second uses a Mac version of suntar.
As it happens, the floppy drive in my SPARC was bad. Fortunately, I found this out in short order. Also fortunately, I actually have two SPARC 4 machines here, one of which has a dead power supply in it. The Sun was out last night, smiling down on me, and the dead machine had a living floppy drive in it. End of that problem. Now let's get on to actual disks.
They carefully tell you that you have to lock the disk image file before you open it with Disk Copy, and they even tell you how to do this. They even tell you how to tweak it so that Disk Copy will recognize it. They don't tell you that if you doubleclick the file after tweaking it, Disk Copy will claim to be unable to read it. Sigh. You have to run Disk Copy first, and use a menu command that creates a floppy. Hey, it could have been worse; I got through this one on the second try.
Unfortunately, when I tried to boot to that disk, I got a rather peculiar message. It said something about a bad magic number in the disk label, and squawked that it couldn't open the boot device. I figured I should try suntar, which led me to...
Doubly unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anyplace on the page (it's here if you care to read it yourself) where they tell you that you must not lock the file if you expect to open it with suntar. I wasted quite a bit of time trying to figure this one out, and was eventually helped by a pseudo-random hint from the highly esteemed, wireless Dr. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, to whom, along with the redoubtable Cynbe Ru Taren, I often turn when my quasi-cyborgian appendages behave like the nasty little turds that they so regrettably frequently emulate.
Ahem.
Having created another floppy, I think I got some other error; or maybe it was the same error. I don't really recall. In any case, having noted that the Debian folks say "try several times", I did that. In fact, just for yucks, I tried about 3 dozen. No, I am not kidding. It was actually more like 4 dozen, because whenever a disk failed to survive the Disk Copy process, I tossed it out, and there were at least a dozen of those on top of the roughly 35 I kept. Of these,
I eventually tried using an unbent paperclip to eject the original disk at the boot prompt, so I could substitute one of the ones that couldn't get that far, in the fond hope that perhaps such a disk might have only one error on it, and thus might permit me to get a boot with two floppies instead of one. This, too, provided distressing results.
I should note that the Debian people tell you to use new floppies (which I didn't have), and to try cutting floppies on several different machines if you have trouble, also not an easy option here. Sigh.
Having learned A Thing or Two, I decided to go for the gusto. The highly esteemed "Big Mike" Nicewonger having furnished me with an external SCSI box (drive sleds and internal SCSI cables for the SPARC 4 and SPARC 5 series of machines are unobtainium), I plopped a pair of 1-gig hard drives and an old Apple CD-ROM drive into it and attached it to the SPARC. Then I attached my old Philips OMNIwriter to my Mac, and found a neat page with a happy little lightweight downloadable ISO image for a bootable CD-ROM.
The Electric Elf is careful to note on his page that "Installing Debian is beyond the scope of this document, as is burning this ISO to a DC :)", so I can't say I wasn't warned.
The image downloaded swiftly and smoothly, and I turned it into a Disk Copy file with ResEdit, just as I had done with the rescue disk image from the Debian page. (This one, if I recall correctly, actually did mount properly if I doubleclicked it.) I then used Toast 5.0.2 Titanium to cut a CD of it.
When I figured out how to get the SPARC to boot to that drive and stuck the CD into it, I got the "Bad magic number in disk label" problem again. Oh, crikey. Just by the bye, the first half of that sentence involved...
While trying to get the SPARC box to boot from the ROM drive (there are several ways to do this, as it happens), I reverted it to the factory defaults, which look like
boot-device = disk net
When I then tried to bring up the machine, I found myself looking at an endless loop of "Where's My Bloody RARP Packet, You Twit?!"
Argh.
I tried various keyboard maneuvers, none of which worked. Then I tried yanking the ethernet cable, which caused each of the entries to complain that there was something wrong with the network, and to tell me to use the PROM command "help network" (or something like that) for more information. Needless to say, I couldn't get the damned machine to give me its little "Ok" prompt, so I couldn't issue any PROM commands.
I will spare you the agony, and just tell you the spoiler, in case this ever happens to you. Find the key on the keyboard that says "STOP". Press and hold this key, and press the "A" key. This maneuver issues a "BREAK" signal. If you don't have a keyboard on your SPARC machine, attach a terminal to it and press the BREAK key on the terminal.
Another thing they don't tell you (grrr) is that SPARC machines, for some ineffably stupid reason, use 512-byte blocks on their CDs, which almost nothing supports. The "Bad magic number in disk label" error can arise if there is actually a bad magic number, but it can and will also occur if your CD-ROM drive is not compatible with this peculiar requirement ...and almost none of them are. My Apple CD-600i isn't, and my Plextor 32TSi, which is reported to work with Ultra SPARCs, clearly fails with my SPARC 4 workstation.
I have cut no fewer than FIVE disks, all of which return the same error, because I thought it was a real error until the aforementioned Sandy Stone noted the other possibility to me. (I, naïf that I am, had expected a real error message if the Apple drive wasn't compatible with Sun's requirements, which I had no suspicion were so weird.) Now that I know about it, however, I have Ze Seekrit Veepon: I happen to own an actual Sun CD-ROM disk (I think it's OpenWindows, or something of the sort), and if I get a "Bad magic number" error with that, I think I can safely presume that it's a hardware problem.
Alas, at this point I'm dead in the water, because I've run out of drives to try in the external box. My bet is that one or more of the five disks (I know a lot more now about getting Toast to cut ISO 9660 ROMs!) is actually viable, but unless and until I can find something that will read it, I'll never know.
...I still, dammit, do not have Debian installed on my stupid SPARC 4 box. In fact, I have nothing, not even formatted hard drives.
Sigh...
(Later, that same day...)
I have now been advised about the "block" jumper on the back of the Plextor CD-ROM drive. Alas, it doesn't seem to make any difference. (Sigh. I thought for a minute that we had it nailed. The 32TSi is reported to work with Ultra SPARC machines, as far as I'm aware.)
(2002.01.27, early AM)
I was wrong yet again. The Plextor 32TSi works just fine, if I provide it with a Sun-readable boot disk. Our buddy George found yet another site with a "netinst" ISO image, this time a SPARC one (I regret to say that the previous one was Gotcha #7, not clearly marked i386 Only, argh...), and Big Mike cut me a CD from it, on a Linux or OpenBSD machine at his house. This CD goes smoothly through SILO and takes me to a boot: prompt, but when I then tell it that my CD-ROM reader is SCSI, it fails to find the file it needs. This, dear friends, is because the file is not present on the disk. Alas, I did not write down the URL from which George got the file, and I have not yet succeeded in finding it and trying the same maneuver here.
On The Other Hand...
I did download the largish ISO of the first CD of a full install set, and here we reach...
I tried cutting a CD-RW disk with this ISO on it.
Turns out that this Just Won't Cut the Mustard. Don't do it.
In fact, it's possible that almost any writer that will even handle CD-RW disks will fail to write a disk that a SPARC can read. I don't know whether to call down the vengeance of the Gods upon Sun, Debian, Philips, or all three...
I then tried to use my older ROM writer, a Philips CDD-2000. I've had some peculiar behavior from this device in the past, and today was no exception; so far, it has created two coasters and zero boot ROMs. Tiring of this, I went to run my head-cleaning disk in it, and discovered that I'm Afraid I Can't Do That, at least on my Blue-&-White, so I have transferred the drive to an older Mac that I have here. (Couldn't do it there, either, until I disabled the ROM reader that's in the older Mac, but I did, indeed, manage eventually, and in a mere few moments I will once again attempt to make a bootable disk for the SPARC.
I have now been through 2.5 evenings of stupidity with this; I have wasted many hours, four dozen floppy disks, and over half a dozen CD-R disks; I am unbearably frustrated with the Debian Web site, with the stupid morons at Sun who insisted on using some ridiculous "standard" that's different from most of the world, with whoever came up with a netinst ISO that has nothing remotely resembling a linux_a.out file in it; & with Toast and Philips for failing to come up with anything that the Sun box will actually read... and I STILL don't have Debian on my stupid SPARC. I don't, in fact, have anything beyond an occasional boot prompt that I can't use.
Argh....
(08/09 Feb, 2002)
Me. I happened to go to NYC last weekend, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden was kind enough to download the rather large ISO for the first install disk & cut me a CD-ROM of it, which just works.
Now, of course, I must learn to cut partitions into disk platters (hard to get in there... can I use my Swiss Army knife to scrape into the platters? ;o), and then I've got to do an actual build; but I don't think it will be long now, and it doesn't look to be horrendously difficult.
Pseudo-mailto: jon [at] bazilians [put it here] org
Last modified: Fri Feb 8 23:03:36 PST 2002