Sun Sparc 5 woes

[rkitchen at coe.neu.edu (Ryan L. Kitchen)]

After wrestling with solaris 8 and all sorts of profile issues, I 
discovered that remotely building a machine from scratch through ssh, is a 
real bad idea, especially for a hack like me.  I goofed a lot of things up, 
did a lot of headscratching, and actually learned a lot, despite banging my 
head against a wall far too frequently.

I decided to turn over a new leaf, break out the dusty SUN keyboard, use a 
monitor, and re-install and set things up locally, so it would work. Enter 
my stupidity: I accidentally used the wrong keyboard on my desk(the sun one 
instead of my pc keyboard), and prematurely ended the installation, as 
the  THIRD and final cd was  JUST about to finish...(grrr). So now when the 
machine boots, I receive this error:

<snip>
Short read. 0x2000 chars read
disk read error
boot: cannot find misc/krtld
boot: error loading interpreter (misc/krtld)
Elf32 read error.
boot failed
Enter filename [/platform/SUNW,SPARCstation-5/kernel/unix]:
</snip>

Now normally, if I just unplug the keyboard when the machine is starting up 
I get a console prompt and i can just type in "boot cdrom" and away 
installation goes...however, this message will not let me do that. I don't 
know how to re-install from this point. i'm just stuck, and its killing me 
not having mail-server/ftp/webserver running. I loathe IIS, and although I 
could turn it on, I would really rather have my trusty sparc up and running.
Any ideas? Thanks.


Ryan Kitchen