Re: Booting 10.0 from CD on Sparc IPC fails - Data Access Exception

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> The limit varies depending on the machine.  From the sparc/boot man page:

>   On sun4 and early PROM version sun4c machines, the PROM can only
>   boot from the first 1Gb of the disk.

>   On later PROM version sun4c and early PROM version sun4m machines,
>   the PROM can only boot from the first 2Gb of the disk.

>   On later PROM version sun4m machines, the PROM can only boot from
>   the first 4Gb of the disk.

In case anyone is curious, these probably are:

- The 1G limit probably comes from using only 6-byte CDBs for SCSI
   access, meaning only 21 bits of (½k) sector number.

- The 2G limit probably comes from using a signed 32-bit byte offset.

- The 4G limit probably comes from using an unsigned 32-bit byte
   offset.

I have some machines set up with a small (anywhere from 32M to ½G)
partition at the beginning of the disk, containing nothing but booters
and kernels, with a kernel configured to put root on another partition,
to work around problems such as this.

/~\ The ASCII				  Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML		mouse%rodents-montreal.org@localhost
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B