I haven’t had much time to put into my Cobalt Qube3 since I acquired it. My goal has been to install Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS, but while playing with it I seemed to have corrupted the original OS. Using the Sun documentation and the Cobalt OS Restore CD I’ve been trying to restore the OS, which is much more troublesome than it sounds.

The trouble began with this error: “kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 16:40″, which I fixed by switching the order of optical drives in BIOS. Then, boot from net resulted in an instant kernel panic. I realized that my the DHCP from my router might be causing some havoc, so I disabled that. Currently, it seems to be working, but the LCD never says “booting kernel” as the readme says it should. The link light is intermittently lit, however, so I’m hopeful. I should root around for a crossover cable and skip my router completely in favor of simplicity and least point of possible failure.

I should mention that the OS restore CD requires a specific network interface card. I was fortunate enough to have a 3com 3C905B on hand that works with the old tulip driver. Oddly, while loading the linux kernel from the OS Restore CD, there are several errors about not being able to insmod the tulip module and I nmap doesn’t think the nic on the my computer is up. That might explain the lack of “kernel booting” message.

I did try installing Ubuntu on a drive in my desktop computer and moving to the cube mostly following Ben’s “Slackware on a Qube3 post, but only succeeded in scoring some kernel panics. I finally have a USB to Serial cable with a Null Modem adapter so I can use the serial console and I’ve upgraded the memory from 64MB to 512MB. Now perhaps I’ll try to use debootstrap and NFS to net boot a new system following Tim’s “Installing Debian 3.1 Sarge on a Cobalt RaQ4″ post next.

The output of the serial console while booting follows. I think that the boot is hanging after unpacking the kernel. Nmap shows me that the interface is up, but that there are no open or closed ports.

Sun Cobalt - Smaller, Bluer, Better

Firmware version 2.10.3-SE

Current date: Oct 08 17:24:54 UTC 2006

ROM build info: Wed Dec 10 14:15:03 MST 2003 .

System serial number: S2250518

System type: 3000 series system, Version 2 board

Silicon serial number: 8e000008a7189d01

Monitor: 156420 bytes

Memory: 512 MB

CPU: 1 processor(s) detected

CPU 0: AuthenticAMD 448MHz (4.5 x 100MHz host bus) [BSP]

Initializing flash: done

Flash Bank 0: AMD AM29F080B 1024KB (01:d5)

Flash Bank 1: not installed.

Mounting ROM fs: done

Initializing PCI: done

Initializing ethernet: 2 controller(s) found

Initializing IDE: found ALI M5229 at 00:78

spinning up second channel: done

scanning ide0: master

scanning ide1:

IDE: stabilizing spinup: 100%

Checking Memory: done

Press spacebar to enter ROM mode

Booting default method - From disk

First stage kernel (Linux): Decompressing - done

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 8th, 2006 at 8:10 am and is filed under Play, qube. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.