Invalid Format Code in IDProm

2007-12-25 9:22:00

This summary comes late but here it is at last.Thanks to

all who responded:

"Edward C. Zimmermann" <edz@bsn.com>

Mark Henderson <mch@squirrel.com>

The original question was:

> I received a phone call from a friend of mine who uses

> an old sparcstation 1+ at home. Yesterday it stopped booting

> and dies at bootup time giving an error message:

> "Invalid Format Code in IDProm"

> What does the "Invalid Format Code in IDProm" mean?

> What might have caused it?

> What are the possibilities to fix it?

Basically the cause of this error message is that the contents

of the NVRAM is junk. That is caused because the battery of NVRAM

is empty. Because the battery is integrated in the NVRAM you

will have to replace the chip.

In this case we first tried resetting the NVRAM. This is done

by pressing "L1" and "n" key simultaneously at powerup time and

releasing them once banner appears. Then new values were

programmed into NVRAM. This seemed to work first, but allways

after poweroff the contents of the chip were junk again.

The solution was buying a new chip. Problems arise when we

couldnt restore the old ethenet address or the hostid and

the serial number of the chip was not found from Suns

databases. We made the values ourselves as found in

instructions in Sun NVRAM/hostid FAQ.

The problems are now solved.

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