Hey Jon,

I found out my Sparc 1+ NVRAM is dead yesterday too!  What a coincidence
:)

I took the dangerous/stupid way to solve the problem in the NVRAM faq,
and scraped away some filler on the side of the chip to expose some
contacts and hooked up a 3v battery pack to it (2 duracell AA batteries
in a plastic casing which came from a logitech mouse box with a blinking
light). They recommend against it for many reasons, but my thoughts
were: "It's dead... I can't possibly hurt it" :)  The worst part is the
soldering... I had to get my electronics friend to come over, just
because he has a more steady hand than I do.  The procedure was totally
successful.  I've left my Sparc 1+ off overnight and this morning when I
turned it on, all the NVRAM values were still there.

If you are looking forward to a long wait before your item is shipped,
and you may have an adventurous spirit, and you have the time to kill
(took about 3 hours in total), give it a try.

As for your other question, I'm not sure if it's possible to upgrade
openboot, if you find out it is, could you let me know also?

Jon wrote:
> 
> Hello All,
> 
> This is my first post to NetBSD, so sorry if this has
> been covered before. I have quickly searched the
> mailing lists, and came up blank. The NVRAM on a sparc
> 1+ I have is dead.  I'm ordering a new chip from
> mouser, but I also noticed I'm running an old version
> of Openboot, v 1.3.  Is there anyway I can update this
> version either by a flash technique or by purchasing a
> new PROM chip?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jon
> 
> p.s. Kudos out to the sparc maintainers and
> documentaiton! I was able to get an IPC up in one
> night network booting, running 1.4.2 w/o ever using
> NetBSD or a Sparc before.
> 
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-- 

Pat Wendorf