Sunfire 280R Can't Recognize Floppy Drive

UNIX Solaris
1

Greetings all,

I'm in a bit of a situation. I have this Sunfire 280R system that did not have a floppy drive in it, yet we needed one. We grabbed one from another Sun box we had laying around unused, and installed it. The system couldnt recognize it. Tried another floppy drive (non-sun) and multiple cables, all did not work. Tried both of the cable connections, etc, etc.. drive light won't even come on. It's definitely getting power, though, because when we intentionally reverse the floppy cable, the access light stays on so juice is there..

The system is running Solaris 8, but I dont even think that's the issue seeing as when we run "test floppy" at the OK prompt, it says "floppy not found" or something like that. BIOS doesnt even see it.

I'm primarily a linux guy, so Sun/Solaris hardware and drivers are not native to me. Poking around google yields nothing =( does anyone know what i can possibly do to the system to get it to recognize the drive? Is there an environment setting (not apparent to me in printenv), or jumpers that en/disable the floppy? I cant get any decent documentation from sun without a support account, either, which i dont have quick access to at the moment.

Any ideas appreciated!

2

nobody has a clue? =( nobody, even our most knowledgeable solaris people, can figure this out.. any ideas would be great

3

From what I can see, floppy drives are not supported on the 280R

=================================================================================
                            Removable Media
=================================================================================
		Manufacturing	Description
Option #        Part #
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
X6167A  	370-3415 [F] 	SunCD 32
X6168A  	390-0025 [F] 	10X DVD-ROM Drive
X6213A  	370-2882 [F] 	7-14GB 8 mm Tape Drive (Medium Grey Bezel)
X6286A  	370-2376 [F] 	12-24GB 4 mm DDS-3 Tape Drive (Medium Grey Bezel)
X6295A  	390-0028 [F] 	20-40GB 4 mm DDS-4 Tape Drive (Medium Grey Bezel)
=================================================================================
4

The server does have USB ports so you could use an external USB Floppy drive.
I have used one on a 280R running Solaris9 and it worked fine.

5

Thanks for the response tornado. I was almost positive that I've had a floppy in a 280R before, but maybe it was a different model.

We did try a USB floppy drive, two seperate ones in fact, with zero success. The OS just wouldnt recognize the drive. Also had some troubles with thumbdrives - it would NOT recognize a newer SanDisk Cruzer U3 1GB thumbdrive (i removed the U3 system from the firmware a while back to make it a plain old thumbdrive) but it WOULD recognize an old PNY Attache 256MB thumbdrive..

Not sure how good USB support is in Solaris 8, but it may certainly be a limitation. Maybe the information i got on how to mount a USB floppy is incorrect, even though i obtained it from multiple sites =\

For now, i'm using this old thumbdrive, but we need a more permanent solution since i'm not always around.. with my thumbdrive..