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Hi,

I want to upgrade an older Sun Ultra 10 running Solaris 8 with a DVD-ROM
drive.

I've already tried a "Samsung SH-D162C" without success. (seems to badly
disturb the whole IDE controller, as I can't even properly boot from a HDD
connected to the primary IDE channel while the Samsung DVD is connected to
the secondary IDE; booting from the Solaris CD placed in the Samsung DVD
drive also results in errors)

Does anyone know a DVD-ROM drive that is currently available on the market
and has proven to work in an Ultra 10?

Thanks!

"Mirko" <mirko@pchome.com.tw> writes:

>I've already tried a "Samsung SH-D162C" without success. (seems to badly
>disturb the whole IDE controller, as I can't even properly boot from a HDD
>connected to the primary IDE channel while the Samsung DVD is connected to
>the secondary IDE; booting from the Solaris CD placed in the Samsung DVD
>drive also results in errors)

You did jumper it to be IDE master, I hope?

Casper
--
Expressed in this posting are my opinions. They are in no way related
to opinions held by my employer, Sun Microsystems.
Statements on Sun products included here are not gospel and may
be fiction rather than truth.

Try Lite-On Drives.

I also found that a lot of drives do not work. This is also becoming a
FAQ in the german sonnenblen.de forum (sun for hobbyists forum).

Hardware Support on Solaris sucks so fucking much. It's really hard to
be Sparc fan.

llothar wrote:
> Try Lite-On Drives.
>
> I also found that a lot of drives do not work. This is also becoming a
> FAQ in the german sonnenblen.de forum (sun for hobbyists forum).
>
> Hardware Support on Solaris sucks so fucking much. It's really hard to
> be Sparc fan.
>
That depends on the model. Newer models have less problems with hardware
issues. I have recently purchased a used Sun Blade 2000 (Ebay, ~600
bucks incl. 2G RAM and a 21" Mon.) that works like a charm, even with
low-cost PCI extension cards.

Helge

Thats not an excuse.

To write a device driver in the late 90'th that does not work with
_ALL_ modern ATAPI cdroms is just a failure of the programmers and
terrible ignorance from Sun. I've never seen such problems with
anything operating system except Solaris.

And the Sun guys don't do anything against it. Even with modern
supported IDE controllers you are limited to 120 GB with Solaris 10.
This sucks, sucks, sucks.

llothar wrote:
> Thats not an excuse.
>
> To write a device driver in the late 90'th that does not work with
> _ALL_ modern ATAPI cdroms is just a failure of the programmers and
> terrible ignorance from Sun. I've never seen such problems with
> anything operating system except Solaris.
>
> And the Sun guys don't do anything against it. Even with modern
> supported IDE controllers you are limited to 120 GB with Solaris 10.
> This sucks, sucks, sucks.

Actually it is not a problem with sparc's but the really crappy PC
hardware. When you cann't put _ANY_modern IDE drive into a PC and
expect it to work is it a problem with the PC? I have had more trouble
trying to buy replacement drives (CD/DVD/hard) for existing Dell/Compaq
PC's than I have had putting a drive into a sparc. The problem is with
the low-price point that suppliers to PC makers have to deal with.
Workstation makers can demand from suppliers a quality drive, while PC
makers demand that drive be supplied at the lowest price. The drives
supplied with my Ultra-10 at least had the components solder to the
board, while the drives supplied with our current crop of PC had IC's
that had OBVIOUS cold solder joints and failed.

"Even with modern supported IDE controllers you are limited to 120 GB
with Solaris 10.
This sucks, sucks, sucks."

I am not sure where this nonsense came from as I am running Solaris on
a pair of 250gb drives in a gateway e-4000. Most of the PC servers
that I run Solaris on all have nearly a terabyte of IDE disk (3 300gb
disks) without problems. Maybe you are referring to the Ultra-10 which
nearly 10 years old and disks with 10gb were considered large beyond
belief. My Ultra-10 came with a 9gb disk and was used with Samba to
serve user space for 10 PC's. My much newer Blade-1000 has an off the
shelf IDE and USB-2 controller that works just fine with __QUALITY__
ATAPI/IDE drives

llothar wrote:
> Thats not an excuse.
>
> To write a device driver in the late 90'th that does not work with
> _ALL_ modern ATAPI cdroms is just a failure of the programmers and
> terrible ignorance from Sun. I've never seen such problems with
> anything operating system except Solaris.
>
> And the Sun guys don't do anything against it. Even with modern
> supported IDE controllers you are limited to 120 GB with Solaris 10.
> This sucks, sucks, sucks.
>

Really? Thought that was a hardware limitation with the 5/10 series.
I've heard about a 137 GB limit, but that's not much better.

But you're right, there are still problems with hardware support, and
you're still far from being able to use any standard component. You
still have to check the HCL and the available newsgroups to find out
wether a component works or not.

So there are still a lot of things to do for the guys at Sun, especially
if they really want to be able to compete with Linux that has a far
better hardware support.

Helge

"llothar" <llothar@web.de> writes:

>To write a device driver in the late 90'th that does not work with
>_ALL_ modern ATAPI cdroms is just a failure of the programmers and
>terrible ignorance from Sun. I've never seen such problems with
>anything operating system except Solaris.

I have not seen issues with other CD drives in Ultra 10s.

Though OpenBoot may refuse to boot from DVDs.

>And the Sun guys don't do anything against it. Even with modern
>supported IDE controllers you are limited to 120 GB with Solaris 10.
>This sucks, sucks, sucks.

There's no such limitation in Solaris 10. There's such a limitation
in Ultra-5/10 hardware.

So how big is this disk[1]?

0. c0d0 <DEFAULT cyl 30398 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63>
/pci@0,0/pci-ide@f/ide@0/cmdk@0,0

No tricks, no issues; just plain IDE.

Casper

[1] 250 SI GBs.
--
Expressed in this posting are my opinions. They are in no way related
to opinions held by my employer, Sun Microsystems.
Statements on Sun products included here are not gospel and may
be fiction rather than truth.

Helge Stahlmann <helge.stahlmann@yahoo.de> writes:

>Really? Thought that was a hardware limitation with the 5/10 series.
>I've heard about a 137 GB limit, but that's not much better.

You are right and he was not. BTW 137GB is just 128 GB; but one is SI
(or vendor) GBs, the other binary GBs.

Casper
--
Expressed in this posting are my opinions. They are in no way related
to opinions held by my employer, Sun Microsystems.
Statements on Sun products included here are not gospel and may
be fiction rather than truth.

"Casper H.S. Dik" <Casper.Dik@Sun.COM>
:4474259f$0$31653$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl...
> "Mirko" <mirko@pchome.com.tw> writes:
>
>>I've already tried a "Samsung SH-D162C" without success. (seems to badly
>>disturb the whole IDE controller, as I can't even properly boot from a HDD
>>connected to the primary IDE channel while the Samsung DVD is connected to
>>the secondary IDE; booting from the Solaris CD placed in the Samsung DVD
>>drive also results in errors)
>
> You did jumper it to be IDE master, I hope?
>
> Casper
> --
> Expressed in this posting are my opinions. They are in no way related
> to opinions held by my employer, Sun Microsystems.
> Statements on Sun products included here are not gospel and may
> be fiction rather than truth.

Yes, I did. And the DVD-ROM drive was the only device on that IDE channel.

Today we tried an older NEC DV-5700B DVD-ROM drive which we took out of a
Windows PC and this one works just fine in the Ultra 10 machine. The Samsung
DVD drive is now in the Windows PC and works there great too.

Thanks for the replies!