Infrastructure Software

Hi,

I purchased two Sun Blade 150 workstations from a university as surplus, with the hopes of installing SXDE on them. Both machines had NVRAM passwords set, so they wouldn't boot from CD. I didn't have any other SPARC machines to swap drives with.

I found some HOWTOs online that suggested pulling the NVRAM chip then re-inserting while the machine is running. I made an attempt at this, and it cleared the password, however, I got an unable to boot error. I restarted with Stop+A and issued the "set-defaults" command.

Unfortunately, I'm now getting errors stating "The IDPROM contents are invalid". If I attempt to "boot cdrom", I get two errors, "FATAL: OpenBoot initialization sequence prematurely terminated." and "FATAL: system is not bootable, boot command is disabled".

Also, the banner shows a different MAC and HostID from what it previously was - and the HostID is completely different.

I searched extensively for solutions to do this, but all of them seem to hinge on older versions of OpenBoot which have the mkp or mkpl commands to directly edit the IDPROM.

Does anyone have any suggestion on how to restore the system to a working condition? I know the new NVRAM units are around $40 each, which is more than I paid for the systems. I'm a college student, and was just hoping to get some experience with Solaris on a SPARC platform.

Thanks,
Jason