Hey, any of you other unixly persons have much experience with Ultra 10s? I just picked one up for cheap and I'm having troubles seeing what I'm doing. Makes playing with the new toy kinda difficult.

Background info:
Sun Ultra 10 w/Creator 3D graphic option
UltraSPARC processor @ ???
256 Meg stick of JEDEC RAM in Bank 1
NO hard drive at the moment (oddly, uses ATA drives)
Standard Sun floppy drive and CD-ROM

The story:
Just to make sure I wasn't missing anything, I attached my 13W3 Sun monitor to the Creator 3D card, and my awesome "sync-on-anything" NEC monitor to the HD15 D-sub. Plugged in the keyboard and power cords. Flipped the rear power switch and the thing came to life without me having pressed the front panel or keyboard power buttons. Keyboard flashes LEDs and emits a standard beep. After that, nothing. No response to keyboard 'lock' keys, no beeps, and neither of my screens ever find a signal to sync on. I've tried toggling the sync style switch on the back of my PC monitor (SoG / Composite Sync) and doing signal crossing with Sun-branded 13W3<->HD15 adapters. Nothing.

I've shifted the RAM into different slots thinking it might need to be reseated. Didn't work.

I've unplugged and replugged the power supply connectors on the motherboard. Didn't help.

At this point, there's not much more to check. It's a pretty barebones system, but I'm hoping for some signs of life. Anyone got any ideas?

I have some experiance with sparcs, and had a similiar experiance with one.

If a sparc has an error during the boot process, the computer will not turn on the monitor, instead it will give you feedback through the serial port.

Perhaps, it will not boot properly without a hard drive.

I was afraid of something like that. I was holding off using the serial console as a last resort, mainly because my null-modem cable is buried at the bottom of a box full of junk.

Lousy Sun. Why can't they have nice pretty graphic-port friendly firmware like SGI?

Hooray. I got something to happen.

Dug up aforementioned cable, made the ritual sacrifice to the RS-232 gods, and got this message looping hundreds of times:You wouldn't happen to have a handy-dandy error code cross-reference chart, would you?

Additionally, something I noticed while browsing around on various forums is that memory should be installed in pairs. How critical is that? Anybody have an Ultra 5/10 memory module I could borrow to test that out?

Well the memory in my Ultra 2 is different, but with mine you need to install it in either pairs or quads, not sure which on the top of my head. If people are right that the memory has to be installed in pairs, it would certainly cause errors having only one stick. But off the top of my head I would guess that the ultra 10 does not require two sticks.

All I can say is that make sure you have everything plugged in you can, keyboard, hard drive, etc.

Sparc hardware is just...strange. If you need help installing an OS, thats more of my area of expertise. Good luck.