TFTP booting on SPARCstation IPX

["James Ascroft-Leigh" <JamesAsc@bigfoot.com>]

I am not sure if this is the correct email address but I am having a problem
booting into Debian on my SPARCstation IPX.  Actually I have two IPXs with
48Mb RAM and 16Mb RAM, ROM Rev 2.4 and ROM Rev. 2.3 respectively.

They both act in exactly the same manner when I boot them from my other Sun
computer, a SPARCstation IPX using the command 'boot net'.  They will
successfully download the boot image and begin to execute it but they appear
to freeze on when they try to load Linux.  The screen says:

OK boot net
Boot device: /sbus/le@0,c00000   File and args:
1e460
TILO
Booting Linux...

I have left them here for many minutes and they do not progress beyond this
point.  Pressing Stop+A has no effect.
I am using the potato image for the sun4cdm named tftpboot.img.  This file
worked fine on the SPARCstation 5 and also the two IPXs booted fine using
the RedHat tftpboot images and the slink image (I would prefer to use the
potato image because slink did not seem to give me the option to install
over HTTP or FTP directly from ftp.uk.debian.org).

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide,

James Ascroft-Leigh
mailto:JamesAsc@bigfoot.com