4/60 format woes

[Will Nelson]

I have a problem that SUN Tech Support is flailing with, so I thought I
would draw on the Net's collective experience to see if we can figure out
what is going on.

I want to upgrade my SPARCstation 1 (SUN 4/60) to SUN OS 4.1.  The problem
is that I want to format my disk, and I can't get into the menu that would
allow me to do this.

The system has no internal drives and no floppy drive.  It has three
external SCSI shoeboxes, one with a magnetic drive, one with a 1/4" SCSI
cartridge tape drive (Emulex driver), and an erasable optical disk drive.
All have LUN 0.  The magnetic drive is jumpered as SCSI target 0, but is
recognized as sd3. The cartridge tape is jumpered as SCSI target 4. The
optical drive is jumpered as SCSI target 1.  Only the last device in the
daisy chain, the optical drive, is terminated.

I do b st() from the > prompt and get the boot prompt.  I then st(0,0,4)
-sw and it reads the munix kernel off of cartridge tape, loads the kernel
ok, probes the devices (ie, reads the label off of the magnetic disk), and
then asks :

Initialize ram disk from device (ft%d[a-h], fd%d[a-h], sd%d[a-h])

Note that it doesn't list the cartridge tape drive as a possibility. It
was supposed to ask me

	What would you like to do?
	 1 - install SunOS mini-root
	 2 - exit to single user shell
	 Enter a 1 or 2:

The bottom line is that I am unable to format the SCSI magnetic disk. What
it looks like to me is that the MUNIX doesn't have the SCSI tape driver in
it. When it probes the devices, the st0 device is not listed. Yet the PROM
was able to read from the SCSI cartridge tape.

If I try to enter sd0 as the device to initialize the ram disk from, it
doesn't recognize it as a valid device.

I ran into this same problem when I loaded 4.0.3c from tape when I first
got the system. Since the drive was already formatted and I was in a hurry
to get the system up, I just went ahead and loaded the OS. But now I would
really feel most comfortable re-formatting the drive with the 4.1 format
program, and am curious to find out what is going wrong. I have been using
the system for close to a year now with few problems, so I don't think
it's some kind of cabling or termination problem.

Will Nelson			Internet: will at presto.ig.com
Intelligenetics, Inc.		Uucp:     ames!ig.com!presto!will
700 East El Camino Real		(415) 962-7363
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