Bootloading Problems on E250

[Jesse Kempf]

I have a Sun E250 that was decommissioned over the summer (it had  
been running Solaris 9) that I want to put back into service running  
FreeBSD 6. I've had no end of problems yet.
Firstly, I'd tried booting from a 6-RELEASE CD. That doesn't work.  
The next approach I took was to use an old Ultra60 to build the  
latest STABLE code onto a hard drive which I can pop into my E250.  
Here's what happens when I stick the drive into the E250 and try to  
boot from it:

RSC Alert: Host System has Reset


Sun (TM) Enterprise 250 (2 X UltraSPARC-II 400MHz), No Keyboard
OpenBoot 3.28, 1024 MB memory installed, Serial #12853310.
Ethernet address 8:0:20:c4:20:3e, Host ID: 80c4203e.



Rebooting with command: boot /pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/disk at 0,0:a
Boot device: /pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/disk at 0,0:a  File and args:
 >> FreeBSD/sparc64 boot block
    Boot path:   /pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/disk at 0,0:a
    Boot loader: /boot/loader
Consoles: Open Firmware console

FreeBSD/sparc64 bootstrap loader, Revision 1.0
(root@, Tue Jan 24 05:53:27 EST 2006)
bootpath="/pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/disk at 0,0:a"
Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf
/boot/kernel/kernel data=0x46d208+0x5bbe8 syms=[0x8+0x626e8+0x8+0x52af4]

Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt.
Booting [/boot/kernel/kernel]...
nothing to autoload yet.
jumping to kernel entry at 0xc0048000.

RSC Alert: Host System has Reset

Clearly the E250 is not as "fully supported" as the hardware docs  
indicate. Where do I begin trying to fix this problem?

Cheers,
-Jesse Kempf
VLSI Lab Systems Manager
Center for Integrated Electronics
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute