451+7053=hang? help!

[Carl Rigney]

Summary: Sun 4/280 with 451 and 7053 controllers will boot from miniroot
but not from A partition.

I have a Sun 4/280 running SunOS 4.0 with 32MB memory, a 451 disk
controller with 2 Hitachi 892MB drives on it, a Xylogics 6250bpi tape
drive, and a vt320 on the ttya port as console.

Last Saturday Sun moved the 2 892MB disks to a 7053 (SMD-4) controller
(and formatted them) and put two Fujitsu Eagles on the 451 controller (and
formatted them).  They also installed a high-res monochrome monitor as
console, and took the vt320 off.

I installed the Sun "Feature Tape" for the SMD-4 and configured a new
kernel.  I can boot the standard kernel that comes with the sun
distribution tape from the miniroot on xy0b or xd0b (the Eagle or the
Hitachi, respectively), and I can boot our new kernel from either.  If I
try to boot either kernel from the A partition of xd0a or xy0a, it hangs
just after printing where root on... swap on... dumps on...  and flashing
the keyboard lights - it does this for both "swap generic" and "root on
xd0a swap on xd0b" configurations.  Oddly enough, for a "root on xd0a swap
on xd0b dumps on xd1b" it still prints out that it's dumping to xd1b.
I've left it hung for more than an hour and it doesn't do anything more.
When booting the miniroot or modified miniroot only a few seconds pass
between the "dumping on" message and the single-user prompt.  In all
versions, it recognizes all controllers and devices.

When it's hung, an L1-A and G0 from the console cause a panic: zero &
syncing disks, so we believe the kernel is running, but isn't seeing the
monitor.

The eeprom 0x16 was set to 00 (1280x900 Monitor) so I set it to 0x13
(1600x1280) since I have a high-res monitor.  It still hangs.  I
reattached our vt320 to ttya and changed 0x1F to 10 to use that as
console, and it still had the same problem.

I can newfs & mount any of the disk partitions, so we're currently running
multi-user off of a modified mini-root, but our boot sequence is more
painful than I'd like.

Does anyone out there have any suggestions for what may be wrong?  Sun
software support says its a hardware bug; hardware says its a software
bug.  I suspect I may just have some small thing set wrong - has anyone
else run into a problem booting from the A partition with a 7053 & 451
controller on a Sun 4/280?

I'm leaving for a two week vacation Monday and would feel a lot better if
the system were fixed by then - it's working now but requires manual
intervention to reboot.  I realize sun-spots doesn't have that fast a
turnaround time, but its still probably faster than Sun service. :-(

Until 5/12/89 please call Janet Patton at 408-749-2678 or 800-538-8450
x42678 or email to janet at amdcad.amd.com and cdr at amdcad.amd.com.  After
then, please call Carl Rigney 408-749-2453 or 800-538-8450 x42453 or send
mail to cdr at amdcad.amd.com.

Janet Patton
System Administrator, 29k Product Support
janet at amdcad.AMD.COM
{ames decwrl gatech pyramid sun uunet}!amdcad!janet