If your sparc is anything like the ones at work then do a 'STOP A' to bring it
to the boot prompt.  If you have a bootable cdrom then try typing 'boot cdrom'
and see what happens or try 'boot floppy' and see if it boots the floppy.

> I just got a Sparc 5 from work. It has a network card, a CD ROM, a Floppy, a
> hard drive, a tape drive (not needed), keyboard, mouse (optical), and a
> monitor. I would like to get Debian on it, but it seems that when I boot up it
> is configured to look at only the hard drive. How do I change this? I have
> make copies of the two disks from Debian that I have to boot from, then I was
> hoping to install from the internet. Since I have a CD ROM I was also thinking
> about use it but that will mean I need a bootable CD ROM. I have no idea how
> to get a bootable CD ROM. But again this leads to the basic problem of how to
> get the system to boot from something other than the hard drive.