I bought a Sun Enterprise 250 server a few days ago and would like to install Solaris 10u4, Solaris Express and Debian on it. But this is made impossible by the CD/DVD device whose led flickers all the time and it cannot be ejected, not even from OpenBoot using "eject cdrom".

I would like to know if this is normal or if this means the device is broken and should be exchanged with a replacement, which I don't have. I know it is possible to boot and install it over the network but then I would have to set another computer up as an x86 boot server, so I'd rather not.

My intention is to port Slackware 12.0 to it just as I did with MIPS.

The device may be broken and should be exchanged if it is, it could also be just be a bad or loose data cable connection.

If the device is broken is it possible for me to use a Promise Ultra 133 TX2 PATA controller with an attached PATA DVD-ROM player? Only two PCI-X slots are occupied and two are free so I would like to insert the Promise controller and a SATA controller with a SiI3112 chip.

Should be possible, you might want to remove the broken drive or at least unplug the power to the broken device.

Network booting didn't work out because even though I set up TFTP on my server I couldn't get it to boot. It would be easier to get something up on the server and figure this out later when I know that the server is at least operational.

I have removed both the SCSI cable and the power from the drive but unfortunately the OpenBoot PROM can't find the IDE controller. I have downloaded the firmware for the Ultra 133 TX2 controller from promise but it will probably be for x86 boot only.

Is there a possibility to change something in the firmware or replace it with a SPARC equivalent to make it bootable? I haven't tried SATA yet and I will try that as well but I don't have a SATA DVD ROM player. I have downloaded the latest Splack 10.2 RC3 iso images and using dd I could get it to work but that will have to wait for later as well.