Tadpole Sparcbook 3GX Harddisc

Hello!

Some years ago I got a Sparcbook 3GX. I got it for little money and
soon I found out why: The harddisc was missing and it's not easy to
find a 2,5" SCSI disk. Now I found one (from a Mac PowerBook) but it is
only 160 MB in size. Is this enough to get a small system running? Text
only would be sufficient. Which OS could I use for this?
Thanks for yout help!

Ingo

 

Sure, any drive around that time frame would be on that order of size
in that form factor. This is well before the drive sizes exploded like
we have today. Why not just run it with an external drive? It isn't
like a SparcBook is all that portable anyway? (even back then they were
pretty chunky?)

You probably should read up on the FAQ..

http://www.unixhub.com/SB-FAQ.html

Even so, you are running pretty lean for disk space, and as you said
X11/OpenWindows would probably be out. I'd start out with Solaris 1.1.2
on the device. (aka SunOS 4.1.4)

 

Or NetBSD.

 

And, in case you don't know -- the external SCSI connector is
one of the two grid shaped connectors. I forget what the other one
does. But this same connector was once used in some Macs as well (I
suspect in their early laptops), and I was lucky enough to find one
being closed out when I got my SparcBook several years ago.

Once I got it running, I didn't bother much with it, because it
had way too little run time on the batteries which I had for it. (It
would just barely get Solaris 2.6 booted before it would run out of
charge.

Note that the URL for the manual has changed. You need to go to

/support/SPARC_Systems/<system-name>

There sre several flavors of Bullfrog, Legacy, Sparcbook5000_6500,
Viper, and VM2100s_VR2100s.

I guess that it is either Legacy/Sparcbook3_3000 or
Legacy/Sparcbook_Plus.

Hmm ... none of the ones which I just downloaded are right.

I found some solid state disks which could fit it, but they were
more than I would pay for a whole system, *new*.

That is the better choice.

Or -- perhaps you can bring up OpenBSD on it. It is a pretty
lean (and quite secure) system.

Good Luck,
DoN.