About eight months ago I gave Jonathan his first Sun workstation, a SPARCstation 1+. The poor machine had no disk, 16MiB RAM and a dead PROM. Jonathan revived the machine by sawing the old battery off the PROM, hooking up some new ones and putting in another 16MiB RAM. At my suggestion, he installed NetBSD on it.

Sadly, the poor machine seems to have died another death in the last week. It no longer boots up properly, instead printing the following on the console:
Unknown device in Sbus slot#1
Unknown device in Sbus slot#2

The odd thing is that the machine doesn’t have anything in SBus slot 2, only a cgsix in SBus slot 1. Some judicious investigation (read: Googling) suggests that the PROM may have become corrupted and that the solution is to boot the machine without the PROM, insert the PROM with the machine on and clear the settings. After my bad experience replacing the PROM on a SPARCstation 20 (which left me with a machine that doesn’t even boot to the PROM), I’ve decided to let Jonathan do this one himself :-)

Will update this story with the results once he’s tried it.