Bought on Ultra 1 167MHz to learn Solaris OS on Sparc. Has corporate OS that boots from hard drive upon power up - but then hangs up because it doesn't see the network it expects. I never get to OK prompt. I'd like to install Solaris 9 from CD. Have downloaded iso's from Sun, but can't figure out how to tell machine to boot from CD since I never get to OK prompt. I know how to force a Mac or a PC to boot from CD (i.e. hold down "c" or change setup in BIOS), but I don't know how to force this machine. (Tried ctrl-c, esc, etc). It says OpenBoot 3.25 and SunOS 5.8 before it start executing the corporate (actually a university) setup. I'd appreciate any help.

I found the stop-A command - now how do I get around the "firmware password"?

Do you get the "OK" prompt? If you get it, put the CD ROM into the CD ROM drive and type: "boot cdrom". Of course the drive must be identified by your system through the SCSI controller. To discover if it is or not, type "help" at the OK prompt and then look for the various SCSI test functions. I everything seems to be OK, then with "boot cdrom" you should be able to boot from the drive and overwrite your net OS. Best regards - Lou

I used the "power up for 2 seconds with the NVPROM installed backwards" trick I found on this site to get past the firmware password. I installed Solaris 9 and got it working (not to my satisfaction - I'm reinstalling because I left out some components - couldn't figure out how to manage user accounts or manually configure network parameters). However, everytime I boot, I get errors saying the IPDROM contents and format code are invalid. It doesn't seem to care - the system goes on after announcing the errors. I've tried set-defaults, but that doesn't seem to change anything. Any ideas on how to fix the IDPROM so I don't see any errors?