Hello All - I just pulled a old Sparc5 from out of my garage. I was sitting because the hard drive crashed back in '99 and it was just replaced with a new server. I want to use it for learning freebsd. There were 2 drives in the machine 1 was the OS, and the other one was data. I pulled the OS drive out (crashed) and now I have the data drive inside only. How do I format the drive and then install freebsd on it? It does not have a CD on it - but there is a spot where I can put a floopy. Please keep in mind I know nothing about Sun machines... I got it to the 'OK' prompt. I typed in probe-scsi-all /iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/espdma@1,20000/esp@1,400000 /iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000//espdma@5,8400000/esp@5,8800000 Target 1 Unit 0 Disk SEAGATE STE32550W, SUN2.1G0418000000000 What do I do next? Thanks

If you pull the top off of a sparc 5 you will see a 50 pin ribbon cable to attach a scsi narrow device like a cdrom. Sun expects the cdrom to be id6. If you would like to boot from it, you will have the best luck with a later model drive. Some of the early ones did not understand variable length boot records. You could also attach a scsi cdrom externally. Sun supports network boot through the jumpstart technology. Typing "boot net - install" . In theory, you could use this to load a non-solaris OS. http://www.deer-run.com/~hal/jumpstart/Jumpstart.pdf The freebsd install media should allow you to format the drives.

I opened it up - Yea I see a spot for the CD, but I dont have a CD with so few pins. I have plenty of PC CD drives around here and PC Floppies and they dont fix the Sparc. I plugged in the network cable and on boot is counts up the memory then says: Timeout waiting for arp/rarp packet. If I type GO from the ok prompt it says: No program is active. Is there a way to get a PC Floppy to work on this thing? What should I try next?

I believe the pc floppy is incompatible. Your best options are 1) external scsi cdrom drive 2) internal scsi narrow cdrom drive 3) read about the sun jumpstart technology and load the new OS over the network.

The older Macs used SCSI CD drives. When my Ultra drive crashed, I swapped in the drive from a Mac Performa.