I got a coffee table(enterprise 3000) for free from a friend a couple of months ago, and I'm trying to convince it to boot.
List of cards
1x Clock Board
1x I/O board
2x CPU Boards
1x SCSI board? It has 2 SCSI headers on it anyway
In addition, its HDD rack is almost full of 18GB drives. Right now, I plug power into the back, hit the switch, and turn the key. The power lights come on on the top supplies and all the cards except the two CPU boards and the main power board (the one with the power jack on it). Does anyone have experience with this problem? Any thoughts on where to start looking?
Although you might think that you've turned the power on you need access to the system controller first. The system controller (SC) is an embedded (Linux) appliance which sits under the Sun hardware and controls it. When you powered up you probably only have power onto the SC. So at this stage I wouldn't worry about modules that don't appear to be coming on.
Answer DukeNuke2's question about console access via the serial interface.
The old Enterprise 3000 don't have a systemcontroller... You will just get console output from serial line... And it takes quite a long time until you get output after powering on the server.