A few months ago I got my hands on a (very noisy) sun E420R hoping that I could dump it in a datacentre somewhere and use for personal projects.
Unfortunately my hopes were crushed fairly quickly when I realized it pulls 3-6 amps under normal operation with one or two power supplies, i've yet to get an accurate amp rating because I've not got found a device to do it yet, but either way I was expected to pay £250+ a month to host this 4U machine... quite unlikely.
The box came with 4gb of ram, the mainboard & riser slots full to the brim, but trying to boot anything via DVD/CD or netboot resulted in system hangs. Presuming this was down to bad memory modules I decided to remove 2GB of ram and see how it does with only 2GB left.
Considering this machine is from ~1999 or 2000, 4GB of ram is a fairly large amount, and 2GB is pleanty for my use - but still I'd like to have 4GB.
So instead of removing 1GB from the mainboard and 1GB from the riser card (knowing my luck, it'd have borked the machine), I just re-seated the riser board to see what would happen. Ignoring the requirements for a "torque screwdriver" I screwed it
Suprisingly, OFW reported 2gb of ram and netbooting it worked first time - the end of my RAM problems as it seems, and it's now happily running Solaris 10.
However my questions still remain - how did possibly incorrectly re-seating the memory riser board disable 4 sets of 256MB chips? and if I do this properly with a torque screwdriver will it be possible to re-enable the extra GB of ram?
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