Re: SunBlade 2500 Silver no video or serial console

Thanks to a tip from ian@ I *un*plugged my USB keyboard and now I'm seeing
output on the serial console!  I'd also like to thank Daniel Dickman for
replying to me off-list with some suggestions as well.

I'll continue playing with this until I get sparc64-current installed and share
my dmesg with the list.  :)


On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 05:04:05PM -0600, 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.