Third Party CDROMs on Suns

[James R. Seamans]

In article <1990Sep12.175946.11606 at rice.edu> joerg at bdc.ubc.ca (Joerg Messer) writes:
>
>Has anyone tried to attach a third party CDROM to a Sun workstation? We've
>attempted to connect our NEC CDR-77 to a Sparc 1 without much success.
>The Sun seems to see the drive on the SCSI bus, but isn't able to boot of
>the disk (SunOS 4.1).  Any ideas?

We also tried to run a NEC CDR-72 on our Sun 390, but alias it would't
work either.

I called our local hot line and was told the following; Sun has modified
the firmware of the Sony drive for 512 byte block access by the booting
system and to be compatiable with the file system.  We could buy the
source but that cost more than getting the Sun CDROM drive.  Getting the
source we could write our own drivers but still would not be able to boot.

Don't you just like these jigsaws....

Jim Seamans
National Library of Medicine
seamans at seaimage.nlm.nih.gov or 301 496-4441