IDE disk boot disk for Netra T1 by Brendan Horan

The Netra T1 has an CMD604 IDE controller. Max Ultra DMA2. Sun has only placed one 44pin IDE header on-board. I am quire sure you could solder a second IDE header on (see the image below), I would not suggest this the 604 has known issues with sending simultaneous DMA requests to each channel.

The header is a standard 40pin header + 4 pin power, so exactly the same as your standard old PATA laptop HDD. Sun originally placed this here for you to use a CD-ROM in the Netra via a special "paddle board" that are extremely hard to find! In all realty we can build our own, but why would you want a CD-ROM when netboot wins!

In order to cut power requirements and to lower the noise level, I wanted to remove the two 9gb SCSI 10k rpm drives. I do not need redundancy nor do I need the speed.

Here is a image of the header in question :-

I brought a 30cm 44pin cable off eBay. You need to file down the sides of the plug to fit into the header, apart from that its 100% pin computable. Pin1 is really pin1.

I placed the IDE laptop HDD over the back SCSI port board as it was a nice snug fit and required no modification to keep the disk in place. You can see the disk on top on the SCSI IO backplane here, please note I did insulate the disk bottom:-

The OpenPROM on the Netra will detect the disk without an issue. It will not by default boot to it, nor is there a pre existing boot alias

You must set up an alias for the Netra to boot from the IDE disk. Do the following at the "ok" prompt:- (Note you can change BSD to what ever you like)

nvalias BSD /pci@1f,0/pci@1/pci@1/ide@e/disk@2,0

Now you can boot the system via :

boot BSD

So now we can boot from an IDE, slow but power efficent and also quite.