I have an e450 I acquired this winter from NASA in Cleveland Ohio....my intention is to sell it....it powers up fine, but the message on the screen says bad magic number, with images of blck diamonds on the screen, this is my first sun machine, so I'm not that familiar with the OS tendencies....HELP
Hello,
the system tries to boot from the internal disk, but they (hopefully) wiped all data from the disks.
The E450 isn't worth much. If you power-on the system, review the first few lines (the banner). Look for the number and speed of cpus and the amount of memory. 400Mhz and faster cpus might have some value. The E450 takes upto 4096MB (4GB) of memory (16*256MB). Review the rear of the system, are there any cards with two identical small connectors (these might be controllers to use additional internal disks besides the 4 standard) ?
This is a link to the E450's Sun System Handbook page
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/E450/E450.html
Michael
if you still need help...
start the install via cd or jumpstart
the system will probably not see the disks
go into format, select each disk seperately
l - to label the disk
y - when prompted if ready to label the disk
exit format
restart the install, and the disks will appear.
when you clear the entire disk the magic number is deleted also.
This message means that there is no VTOC on the boot disk, most likely that the disk was erased at the server's EOL ( format>analyze>verify ). In terms of monetary value, I would agree that the system is not worth much, but old SPARC servers can run great if set up properly, I have a 220R that ran for 14months straight before it needed a reboot after a patch upgrade. We also have a new IBM Xeon server that cannot stay up for more than 3 months ( if we're lucky ), it is a nightmare! The worst thing I think about the E450 is the size, it is like a mobile datacenter! Contact Sun and see if you can get a trade-in deal for a nice new desktop.
