sparc 20 key board boot error

Hello group, I just joined today and I want to ask a question about booting a sparc station 20. actually a 5 and a 20 were given to me with one monitor a key board. the 20 seems to want to boot but when I turn it on I get key board error and a msg to boot via a tty. what does that mean? although i am by no means a unix expert i do have some familiararity with hard ware and hooking it up.the screen comes on for aboput 3 seconds then blanks out. is the problem because i dont have a sun mouse hoooked up to the key board? I sufferd a leg amputation last january so puttering around the house is what i do. If there is anybody close to the san diego area that can give me an idea or 2 i would greatly appreiate it
thanx Robert

There are two ways to boot your sun:

1 use a monitor, keyboard, and mouse

2 use a tty

Somehow the sun can sense the keyboard. I'm not a hardware guy so I don't know exactly what that means. But if it "finds" the keyboard, it will go with option 1 above.

Unplug the keyboard and you use option two.

On the back of the box is one or more db25 connectors. It wants an ascii terminal plugged into the first one.

Instead of an ascii terminal, maybe you can use a laptop or pc with a serial port. Windows has a program called hyperterminal that can pretend to be an ascii terminal.

You want 9600 baud, 8 data bits, one stop bit, x-on, xoff protocol. Those are options for hyperterminal.