Getting Started with ZuluSCSI

To use the disk images on this site, you will need a ZuluSCSI board. I get mine from Rabbit Hole Computing.

I use the ZuluSCSI RP2040 and Compact RP2040, but the regular ZuluSCSI board should work fine as well.

After attaching the board to the computer's SCSI bus, ensure that the termination is set correctly. The Zulu boards have a DIP switch that controls termination. If the Zulu board is not the final SCSI device in the chain (e.g., if there’s a physical CD-ROM drive after the Zulu), then you probably need to turn the termination switch off. Otherwise, it should likely be in the "on" position.

Use a good-quality SD card such as SanDisk and format it on a PC or Mac to exFAT.

Download the image and check the checksum against the checksum on oldsilicon.com to verify they match. On a Mac, you can do this with the shasum -a 1 <filename> command. Heres a link how to do it on Windows.

The images on the site are gzip’d to reduce the size. You will need to uncompress them with gzip -d <filename>.

Copy the image to the SD card, making sure the beginning of the name is correct. The filename controls a few settings. The beginning of the name, e.g., HD3, indicates that the image should be presented to the computer as SCSI device 3. This is generally correct for Sun boxes but can be any number you like. The last part of the name, _512, tells the Zulu board that the host uses 512-byte blocks. All other parts of the name are not important. See the ZuluSCSI Manual for more information.

Place the card in the Zulu board card slot and boot the box. Depending on the configuration of the box, it may or may not boot directly into the OS.

If you are booting a Sun box, you may need to issue the boot command from the OBP command line on the Sun (e.g., boot disk or boot disk3). Once everything is set up, you can configure OBP to boot automatically on power-up if your box is not currently configured that way. Refer to the OBP reference for more information!