Testing Old Hard Drives
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- čas přidán 9. 06. 2023
- Testing some old SCSI drives from eBay in the Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V120. We'll also install Solaris 10 over the network on this thing with a JumpStart server running in Proxmox.
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Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio - Věda a technologie
More Sun content please. It's retro, but it feels modern compares to the other pcs of the era. Maybe it's the Solaris gui.
Totally agree. Everything I've shown is like ~20 years old but feels so ahead of its time.
WD used to have cool drive names for their 10K line, including Raptor and Velociraptor. I had a pair of 74GB Raptors in RAID0 on my desktop ~15 years ago and they were blazing fast (but loud!) just before SSDs became affordable for reasonable capacities as boot drives.
One of my 74GB Raptors died near the end of its 5 year warranty and I got a free upgrade to a 150GB Velociraptor when I RMA'd it. My other 74GB Raptor and the 150GB Velociraptor are still working, or at least they were the last time I tried them a few years ago.
I remember when those Raptors came out and thinking they were incredible. Never had one unfortunately, cool to hear they're still working!
@@clabretro Just picked up some more Seagate Medalist Pro 9140 ST36530W 6.55 GB's new in bag/box for AU$20.00 each this day. Around US$14.00 I think? Retail? Easy US$750+ each.
Hell yeah, can't wait for the thin clients to be set up. Nice work!
Ultrastar still exists though. And btw it is now sold by WD. I have one right here. But you are right about the names of their consumer products.
Love the rant on hdd naming. Found your channel last night and subbed before the end of that first video. I may or may not have already binged all your content… Keep ‘em coming!
Haha glad you liked it, and thanks for subscribing! Definitely more on the way.
Love these type of vids cant wait for more!
thanks!
That install wizzard was definitely cool !
Try looking for an Adaptec AHA-2940UW or AHA-2940u2w pci controller. The UW has the 68pin ultra wide connector. While the u2w is uses 68 pin LVD (low voltage differential) cable. But it is also backward compatible with just Ultra Wide drives.
Using a 68 pin scsi to SCA 80 (80 pin) adapter to connect to those hot swap drives. You can then test the drives and access them on a desktop. I would recommend when getting the cables to also get a terminator too if the cable doesn't have one built in. You need termination on scsi for the signaling to work right. And those hot swap drives don't have any.
I have used Scsi back when the company i worked for build Windows NT 4 and 2000 servers. I remember when 10k drives came out. That was fast for the time.
This is exactly the information I was looking for, thank you! I'll definitely be hunting down one of those cards, I'd really like to see if there happens to be anything on the drives. Plus it'll be very convenient to have a way to access them other than the V120.
@@clabretroI have seen that there were drivers for the 2940 cards for Sun, windows, and Linux. I will add that the ultra wide support 160 speed and the lvd ultra wide supported the 320 speed. But you could also connect the them to the slower 50 pin cables with adapter for 40/80 speed transfers. Each drive would need an ID number set. The SCA 80 adapter usually have the jumps for that on them.
Just ordered a AHA-2940u2w and some cables... we'll see how it goes!
Also try Parted Magic Linux on PC to check smart status for those HDD,wipe them with nwipe
I called my girlfriend a SCSI and she got all SATA.
@13:15 - yes, you need to be routing around looking for metaxxxx (metastat, metainfo(?), metadb etc.) command. See if package SUNWmd (I think it's that) is installed. (pkginfo, think of it as old dnf/yum/rpm)
I would love to see how a netboot is setup and ran. Everything I searched for online and youtube no one explains How to do something like that from scratch.
Sure, I'll get around to making a detailed tutorial video. This is by far the best guide I found, and how I was ultimately able to get it working: www.thegeekdiary.com/how-to-configure-a-solaris-10-jumpstart-server-and-client-sparc/
You're right about probe-scsi as far as I can remember, but I think that's an OpenBootPROM command, not a LOM command. It's been a while since I've been close to a Sun...
OK, you got a bit further....(ok prompt is the OBP prompt 🙂
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say smf is a bit like an early version of systemd (not in the way it replaces init) with better management of /etc/init.d (/etc/rc.d) files. In the '90s symlinking Snn and Knn files wasn't very forgiving if you had a typo).
There are adapters from SCSI SCA 80-Pin to SCSI 68-Pin and then you can use a PCI card on a PC usually adaptec hba controllers
Just picked up an hba and converter actually, hopefully will be able to take a look at those drives.
Old Proliant's and dell's support 80 pin sca scsi directly.
Dell 8th gen would be the go.
@@andrewnoonan5786 Unfortunately the HP DL360 G4p doesn't cut it, they only support HDDs certified for HP with the built-in RAID controller, I currently have such an issue, where I have old IBM SCSI U320 HDDs that aren't recognized whatsoever by the server, but they are recognized by an HBA card.
@@rafaelgruber6133 Interesting. Adaptec cards are an option in that situation. I had an ML310 G3 with an Adaptec card that ran Esxi 5.5 many moons ago as my first ever home hypervisor. Note it was a scsi card and not a raid card but it ran with non hp drives perfectly fine. It was using a Pentium D Extreme which had the relevant virtualisation suppprt. I ran it for a year before replacing it with newer hardware.
Interesting, educational, video. This is my first visit to your site, and I haven't even looked at your other videos yet, but I have subscribed. lI was hoping that I was going to learn what was on the drives.
Why not run Linux on your Sun? There is a Linux dedicated to the Sun systems, one of the flavours being Red Hat. You could buy a PC SCSI card, and run it in an old XP box, or even run linux in that old box. That would have saved you all that work on the Sun, but I guess you wanted to get the Sun computer running anyway.
The largest scsi 80 pin sca drives you can get are 300gb.
I would like to see more on Jumpstart and remotebooting and stuff :)
I actually go over the simplest jumpstart configuration I could create in this video: czcams.com/video/9BW-mbC7Xag/video.html
@20:00 maybe put SUNWmd on the working machine and attach the original Solaris drive and 'scan' the metadata using the path to the original disk. Then delete the non-existing mirror or otherwise make it a one-way mirror and then try a few more fscks. Be gentle with it. 🙂
That's what I'm thinking. Need to do a little more research but it could be possible to get that install back in action.
probably won't work - disksuite keeps it's config is a database on the disks. Multiple copies of this database are made and they need to be in sync. Some of the copies are missing and there are not enough for it to be happy! So they will not allow it to run unless that can be bypassed.
I have the wd caviar green eads.
you could use dtterm, with cde dependencies for ubuntu
I'm formatting a couple of HP 15k 300GB U320 drives for my V210 today. I might be a bit deaf by tomorrow. lol
haha I'll bet that 1U V210 makes about as much noise as the V120. The V240 isn't too bad in comparison.
You can probably access the original drive.
It is using an add on to Solaris called Disksuite (I think).
It creates a mirror or stripe device from physical partitions.
If your book disk is mirrored then try booting from the underlying UFS partitionIf it is a striped or RAID device you are out of luck!
try (from the ok prompt)
devalias # this will list the boot prom aliases - one of them should be your boot disk - usually called disk0, disk1
boot disk0:2 #this will try to boot from partition 2 on the default disk - maybe try partition 0
Thank you! I'll save this comment for next time I try messing around with that drive.
@13:00 Do you know the standard partition config and how it's laid out? (c0t0d0s0-6 etc.) (t= SCSI target)
I did see "metainfo" mentioned somewhere.....that's Solstice DiskSuite. It could be a mirrored pair...
Thanks for that pointer on DiskSuite... I'll have to do a little reading there.
I haven't gotten as far yet to see if you got boot net -install working....
But did you install NIS+ just for the fun? ;:-)
Ha not yet... going to mess around with a name server eventually though.
Hey Clab! My V210 got here, and I'm wondering how you set up the JumpStart server. Do you remember where you found the info to get it working? I saw your video about the X2200, but I don't think the SPARC machines use PXEboot.
Excellent! I setup an x86 Solaris 10 VM in proxmox (you could probably use any hypervisor) as my JumpStart server.
This is a pretty good guide: web.archive.org/web/20230329091434/www.thegeekdiary.com/how-to-configure-a-solaris-10-jumpstart-server-and-client-sparc/
That's the first one I followed, but if I remember correctly you might not have to deal with all the profile stuff or anything (though that full guide should also work just fine). Below is from memory though and it was a long time ago. This is all on the JumpStart VM:
1. Mount the Solaris image you want to serve with the JumpStart server. Make a directory to host the install (/export/install is a typical spot)
2. There are JumpStart utilities in /path/to/image/Solaris_[8/9/10]/Tools. Run "./setup_install_server /export/install"
3. Add the host name you want for the v210 to /etc/hosts. Add a mac address -> hostname mapping to /etc/ethers for the v210. I think you can find the mac address when you boot up the v210 to the OK prompt.
4. Run "./add_install_client sun4u"
Anyway that's the basic idea!
@@clabretroI finally got it working! It took a while, a lot of messing around with Proxmox, but it works! Thank you so much! Just wondering, do you have a Discord server or anything like it?
@@clabretro Hang on a minute! You got NEW SCSI drives there pardner? True OLD SCSI is from early 80's through to mid 90's in my book. I have 1GB-9GB SCSI hard drives that I get offered US$1,000 each for and I cannot get enough!!! The most amazing fact is that most of my drives I sell are used. The BNIB ones go for US$3,000+ every day of the week. Have a great week mate.
fsck is "fisk" as in the journalist Robert Fisk
ah ha, thanks!
@@clabretro No, it's eff ess see kay...
My favourite, lutefsck
At 10:40, where it asks you what terminal you're using, keep in mind usually when this is asked that it's asking what type of terminal _you_ are using to communicate with _it_.
In this case I'm sure you'd want to choose XTerm (12) as the closest match to a GUI terminal emulator.
Might've supported fancier character "graphics" that way.
Oh thanks - I had wondered if it was worth experimenting with that. I'll give it a try next time I'm messing around with this thing.
@20:20 can you just attach an ultrascsi PCI HBA to a Linux machine and then examine the disks that way?
I can't post URLs with help. Try boot -s and then vi /etc/system set md:mirrored_root_flag=1
That's the route I'm gonna go, just ordered an HBA and some cables. There could of course be nothing on them, but I figured it'd be worth trying to check before just blindly formatting them all.
@@clabretro Or did you see my other comment about modifying /etc/system? Maybe try with the one-sided mirror Solaris disk and boot -s and see if / is writable...
@@declanmcardle I'll give that a shot! Really appreciate all the insight here, I'm totally new to all this Solaris stuff!
Shame you didn't have a Quantum Fireball.
I wish!
@@clabretro I have HUNDREDS!!!!!!!!! From 40MB-1,000MB. I would have dozens still in static bags from factory and in original boxed lots. All bound for Apple dealers of course back then. Now they are all mine and I'm so old I used to actually use these from the early 80's through mid 90's. Cheers man.
13:52 why is the date 2020?
I was too lazy to set it right haha
I may be wrong, but in these days of dominance of x86-64 CPU architecture, installation of Unix-like OS (e.g. Debian) or Unix OS (e.g. FreeBSD) is easy and convenient.
Oh yeah definitely. I just like playing around with these older Sun/SPARC machines for fun and to see what they're like. I thought it was cool that Solaris had the equivalent of Linux Live CD behavior.
@19:00 Hmm.....so, you haven't seen a JavaStation then, have you? 🙂
I have, probably one of the most interesting machines they made. Exceedingly rare though 😂