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Why won my non-Sun SCSI CD-ROM drive boot the NetBSD/sparc CD-ROM?

April 26, 2017boot CD drive NetBSD ROM SCSI sparc Sun wont

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Why won my non-Sun SCSI CD-ROM drive boot the NetBSD/sparc CD-ROM?

1 Answer

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10 Posted

Most UNIX workstations, including Sun’s OpenBoot PROM, have a PROM that requires the CD-ROM to support a 512 byte block size. Most OEM Sun CD-ROM drives are set to 512 byte block size by default. Most newer 3rd party drives automatically support both 512 and 2048 byte block sizes. Older 3rd party drives may have a jumper to change the value from 2048 bytes to 512 bytes. Check with your hardware vendor — those drives that do not support 512 byte sectors will be unusable for booting, but will be useable once the kernel is loaded for normal operations. See the Sun CD-ROM FAQ.