Sun collection

2008.12.15

So awhile ago, I got greedy and tried to install a 400GB IDE drive in a Sunblade 150 I’d got for cheap. Those of you who are more familiar with that hardware than I was (or am, really), will already be laughing at what a stupid idea that was. For those of you who don’t know, it can only address about 138GB per drive. The math is out there, but basically it’s a limitation of the IDE controller… and doesn’t apply to SCSI and FC drives in any of the Sun boxes, which is probably why this never occurred to me.

So… I backed off that plan and installed a pair of 120GB drives.  Now the system won’t boot.  And the console is, shall we say, unresponsive. I live a charmed life, I tell ya.

As a result, I have since collected a couple of other old Sun workstations via Ebay and the employee purchase program at work (which are basically “worthless”, like $65), and even an old Pentium 4 for Solaris x86.   So I’ve got the gear, but I haven’t had time to continue with any but the most cursory examinations of OpenSolaris.   I got 2 of them booted up with ZFS root on fairly recent versions of Nevada.   Waiting for the SPARC release of Indiana to be readily available.

In the meantime, I thought I might work on some of my other Solaris related projects.

Categories : Unix  Solaris
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