Jan 232006
A while back I mentioned that I had managed to get an Ultra 60 for $70. It seemed that the graphics card was crocked, but after hunting around some Sun forums I tried hitting Stop+N to zap the NVRAM.
Voila! It not POSTs just fine and I managed to boot the Solaris 10 installer from the SCSI CD I pulled from the Origin 200 (the Ultra60 did not come with one). Now that it posts, I know what I got for my $70:
- 1 x 360Mhz SPARC Ultra w/4MB L2 Cache ($290)
- 1 GB RAM ($60)
- 18GB SCSI HD ($80)
- Creator 3D Graphics Card ($30)
- PCI Ethernet Card ($20)
So, all in all, not a bad deal really – I’ll do the Sol 10 install tomorrow and we’ll see how it performs.
HELP! How did you reset with just Stop-N? I cannot get past boot. Just asks for a firmware password. Any ideas on that Ultra 60?
I never had an issue with a password, only that it would not boot at all, so zapping the PRAM solved that issue. I have managed to swap the Ultra 60 for something a bit more modern so I’m afraid I can’t play around and determine what problem you might be having. However it sounds like the Stop-N procedure is what you need – it resets all the NVRAM variables (including security-password) to factory defaults.
I believe all Ultra 60′s are non-USB keyboards, but just in case you do have options as outlined here:
http://docs.sun.com/source/819-2946-10/oboot.html
Remember that you have to do it as the system boots up, before you POST and get prompted for the password.