[geeks] Solaris on x86 (was Fedora funky-ness...)

[Scott Howard]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 12:57:59PM -0500, Francois Dion wrote:
> Actually I was talking about Sol 9 x86 12/03 cds. For the Sol 9 sparc, I 
> can mount the cds on one of my sparc machine, export and mount it on the 
> laptop. Works fine that way. Sun is saying that 4/04 will have a boot 
> image. I think they ran out of space on 12/03. I  dont know of a 
> workaround for the x86. Have you found a way?

The layout on all of the CDs beyond Solaris 9 is exactly the same - slice
0 is a HSFS partition with the Product directory (ie, the packages to be
installed), slice 1 is a UFS partition with the boot image on it (which
can only be mounted on the same platform as the CD is for - x86 on x86
or SPARC on SPARC). Slices 2 through 5 on the SPARC CD have a bootblock
and a file which direct the machine to boot from slice 1 (for historic
reasons).

This is true for Sol9 12/03 x86 and SPARC, Sol9 4/04 and even Solaris 10.

Historically (Sol8 and below) there used to be two copies of the boot image,
one on slice 1 which was used when booting from the CD, and another on slice
0 which was used in setting up Jumpstart servers. This was changed due to
space limitiations on CD1.  Annoyingly the x86 CD actually has enough room
to put the 2 copies of the boot image in, it's just not done for consistency
with the SPARC release (which is larger, mainly due to having both 32 and
64 bit packages).

So back to what I said before - you can access the boot image on the CD,
just as long as you've got the CD in a machine of the same architecture as
the CD is for.  If you're trying to do this with ISOs rather than actual
CD's you might also want to check out my infodoc on how to do that, at
http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/retrieve.pl?doc=fsrdb%2F50566

  Scott.