How to test a Sun Cobalt RaQ 550?

I bought a RaQ 550 from an auction. It had no RAM or
hard drive so I'm suspicious. It may be faulty.
I put some RAM in from a Sunblade 150. The fans spin
and the LED backlight comes on but there is nothing
on the LED display. All the LEDs near the PSU are on.
I know the Sunblade is critical of the type of RAM.
Is it possible I just need the right RAM or does it sound
like it is toast?

Is there any value in a RaQ 550 with a non-functioning
main board?

Barry
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Home page
http://members.iinet.net.au/~barry.og

Barry OGrady <> wrote:
> I bought a RaQ 550 from an auction. It had no RAM or
> hard drive so I'm suspicious. It may be faulty.
> I put some RAM in from a Sunblade 150. The fans spin
> and the LED backlight comes on but there is nothing
> on the LED display. All the LEDs near the PSU are on.
> I know the Sunblade is critical of the type of RAM.
> Is it possible I just need the right RAM or does it sound
> like it is toast?

> Is there any value in a RaQ 550 with a non-functioning
> main board?


It's 10 year old technology that was made by a company that has been out of
business for about that long, what do you think the value of it is?

We had a bunch of the earlier models (450i or 450r ? the ones with raid) and
every one of them died from the leaky capacitor bit which was in full swing
at the time those Cobalts were made.

We scrapped ours the same way, pulled the hd's and ram out (which I think
was ECC), then gave away or threw out the chassis.

From what I remember the display should print something on power-up, I'm
pretty sure it did a bios test and gave results on the lcd, so even without
ram it should report that after the "welcome to cobalt" message (or
something similar).

The thing is with those, the OS and how the machine was designed is somewhat
available today using that Blue Quartz software (even can use like a Sun
v20z). Gives the same admin/user interface and is at least updated more or
less to current standards.

Just saying even if it costs $10 to fix it, not sure it's worth that
anymore. Besides using P3 processors, the hd controllers are probably limited
to drives under 132gb (or whatever that magic error was), the usb is the old
1.0 standard and without a keyboard/monitor interface, it really doesn't
lend itself to doing anything practical with it besides a web server.

-bruce

Barry OGrady <> writes:
>I bought a RaQ 550 from an auction. It had no RAM or
>hard drive so I'm suspicious. It may be faulty.
>I put some RAM in from a Sunblade 150. The fans spin
>and the LED backlight comes on but there is nothing
>on the LED display. All the LEDs near the PSU are on.
>I know the Sunblade is critical of the type of RAM.
>Is it possible I just need the right RAM or does it sound
>like it is toast?

>Is there any value in a RaQ 550 with a non-functioning
>main board?

I'd agree with your other poster. The 550 was a 1GHZ P3 linux box in a
rackmount format with some GUI wrapper around Apache and mail and DNS.

Even though Sun bought Cobalt, they never really did much to build on
it as it existed, I had heard that they did it for some technology
knowhow in building x86 rackmount servers and nothing else.

From what I remember, the LCD is used to control everything about the
system, and did light up during POST and was used to control the
system (ie. shutdown, renumber the IP settings, status display, etc).

The memory needed in the RAQ550 was ECC, PC133.

If you wanted to see the whole system (as compared to Plesk or Webmin
or whatever else, google BlueQuartz and all the software is still
available for elsewhere, and some people have expanded on it.

This hardware sounds like toast though.

On 17 Feb 2009 18:58:07 GMT, Doug McIntyre <> wrote:

>Barry OGrady <> writes:
>>I bought a RaQ 550 from an auction. It had no RAM or
>>hard drive so I'm suspicious. It may be faulty.
>>I put some RAM in from a Sunblade 150. The fans spin
>>and the LED backlight comes on but there is nothing
>>on the LED display. All the LEDs near the PSU are on.
>>I know the Sunblade is critical of the type of RAM.
>>Is it possible I just need the right RAM or does it sound
>>like it is toast?
>
>>Is there any value in a RaQ 550 with a non-functioning
>>main board?
>
>I'd agree with your other poster. The 550 was a 1GHZ P3 linux box in a
>rackmount format with some GUI wrapper around Apache and mail and DNS.
>
>Even though Sun bought Cobalt, they never really did much to build on
>it as it existed, I had heard that they did it for some technology
>knowhow in building x86 rackmount servers and nothing else.
>
>From what I remember, the LCD is used to control everything about the
>system, and did light up during POST and was used to control the
>system (ie. shutdown, renumber the IP settings, status display, etc).
>
>The memory needed in the RAQ550 was ECC, PC133.
>
>If you wanted to see the whole system (as compared to Plesk or Webmin
>or whatever else, google BlueQuartz and all the software is still
>available for elsewhere, and some people have expanded on it.
>
>This hardware sounds like toast though.

Thanks. That's what I thought.

Barry
=====
Home page
http://members.iinet.net.au/~barry.og