I bought one of these units a couple years ago, and had a similar
experience ... minus the faint clicks, I think.
The nvram should display on the console if the unit booting.
Usually the console is redirected to the display adapter, and frankly I
am fuzzy about the interaction there.
In my case one CPU was loose, as I recall I had to dinkle with a bit.
Make sure your serial connection is set to 9600 8 0 and lets FORCE any
out put to the serial console.
Try removing the display adapter, reseat all the RAM, and remove CPU1.
Attach the console and power up the unit, look for out put on the
console. If you don't see anything swap the CPU's. So that you have
one CPU in socket 0.
If you still get nothing then I think you should notify the units next
of kin.
I also have some vague memory of the usb port used by the keyboard to
have some significance. So while you are trying to console to it dont
have one. If you are trying to use the display for the console make
sure you have Sun keyboard in one of the four ports on the back of the
unit.
Kent R. Spillner wrote:
I have no prior experience with Sparc (or Sun hardware in general) but I
recently purchased a used Sun Blade 2500 Silver on eBay, and would like to run
OpenBSD on it. It has dual UltraSparc III 1.6GHz (I think) processors, 8GB
RAM, and two 146Gb drives. I don't know what kind of PCI video card it came
with, but it was in PCI slot 0 and only has a single VGA port. It also came
with a sound card in PCI slot 6 and a FireWire/USB card in slot 5.
The machine powers on fine, LEDs light up, fans start spinning, I can open the
DVD tray, but there's no output on the video console.
I connected an amd64 laptop running -current to the serial port, but there's no
output on the serial console either (running cu with a USB serial adapter and a
female-to-female null modem). Also, I noticed 3-4 faint clicking sounds a few
seconds after powering it on, but other than the fans that is the only sound.
I already tried reseating the video card, I peeked under the RAM shroud and
verified the DIMMs are all secured, and I reseated both CPUs. It appeared one
of the CPUs was loose, and the heat sink on the other CPU was loose, so I
cleaned both heat sinks, reapplied some thermal paste and reseated both CPUs.
There's still no video or serial output.
I realize this is incredibly vague, and not necessarily on-topic for the list,
but if anyone has any suggestions or advice I'd be extremely grateful.
