SunOS 4.0.3c SPARC

Installing SunOS 4.0.3c on a SPARCstation 1:

The SPARCstation 1 was released in 1989 and was the first of a long line of iconic pizza box style workstations. SunOS 4.0.3c was special hardware support release for this new "sun4c" architecture. It was originally available on QIC tape and floppy disks. The floppy disk version has survived the test of time and disk images are now available from your abandonware repository of choice.

Sun SPARCstation 1

fixing the NVRAM

this machine uses an M48T02 NVRAM, so naturally for a 30-year-old machine the battery is empty. You can still buy replacement NVRAMs (these days often of unknown quality if you end up with a part from a Chinese eBay seller) or you can fix the NVRAM if you have the necessary hardware/soldering skills. After that, the NVRAM needs reprogramming:

enter this series of commands at the "ok" prompt:

press enter after these commands:

set-defaults
setenv diag-switch? false
f idprom@ 1 xor f mkp

then at last enter this command. Press enter and it will do "nothing". Then you need to confirm with "control-D", "control-R". If it DOESN'T print a copyright message, it worked.

8 0 20 B2 E9 08 B2E908 mkpl

disks disks need to have a Sun disklabel. SunOS 4 relies on a format.dat and can technically only label disks it knows, because it doesn't have an auto-detect feature. Solaris however uses the same disklabel and its format utility can autodetect disk geometry and label every disk. I generally recommend booting something like Solaris 2.4 to 2.7 and use it to format and partition the disks. The SunOS 4 installation process can then just keep the existing disklabel.

SunOS releases < 4.1.1 (with a patch) can only use disks up to 1GB. To make my life easier, I decided to use a ZuluSCSI SCSI-to-SD-card adapter.

SunOS 4.0.3c