According to the many web sites I looked over trying to find the answer to my 
question: Yes.  The hitch being that it has to be an IDE CD-ROM drive that 
strickly follows the ATAPI standards.  Several sites claimed that older and 
cheap CD-ROM drives do not follow the standards fully and the SPARC OpenBoot 
has problems with them.

I have NO experience with this, I am just spouting what I have been reading.

Alan

On Thursday 07 March 2002 07:30 pm, you wrote:
> I'm curious about getting that IDE CD-ROM to boot.  Can it?
>
> George
>
> alandd@mindspring.com wrote:
> > I have found the answer to my own question, in case anyone is interested.
> >
> > The Ultra line of Sun SPARC workstations report an IDE controller chip as
> > "CMD Technology Inc PCI0646 (rev 07)"
> >
> > Please ignore this trivia if you don't care.  :^)
> >
> > Alan
> >
> > plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us wrote:
> > > What IDE controller devices are supported on a SPARC system?  I have
> > > seen SPARC based workstations that have IDE/ATA/ATAPI support but the
> > > actual IDE/ATA/ATAPI controller is not specified.  Specifically I would
> > > like to use standard IDE CD-ROM and hard disk drives on a SPARC based
> > > system.
> >
> > Any ideas?
> >
> > Alan
> >
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