[SunRescue] Continuing foibles of Tim and SGI

[AdamKropelinakropel1 at rochester.rr.com]

At 04:44 PM 9/17/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>Mark Davies wrote:
>
> > If you've just ftp a file to IRIX 5.2 then the file is stored in a EFS
> > system state. Am I right so far?
>
>The file is an ISO of the IRIX installation CD.  I don't have a Sun/SGI
>bootable CD-ROM to install off of.  I've got IRIX 5.3 on CD (5 CDs worth
>of stuff, including NFS, IRIS development option, etc), and IRIX 6.5 as
>an ISO.
>
>So, as I have no external CD-ROM, I wanted to mount the ISO file on the
>Indigo, and install the Indy from that mounted ISO.  Now, under Linux,
>you can mount an ISO (I don't mean a CD-ROM that's of the ISO9660
>filesystem, I mean the actual "operating_system.iso" file) through the
>/dev/loop0 device.  The system thinks that you're mounting a block
>device (like a CD-ROM, hard drive, etc), and allows you to mount the ISO
>image as if it were a CD-ROM.
>
>However, I can't find a way to do this on IRIX 5.2 (which is the OS
>version running on the Indigo).  There doesn't seem to be anything
>similar to the /dev/loop0 device under Linux.  So, if I try to mount the
>640M irix_install.iso file, it won't do it, because the file isn't
>associated with a block device.
>
>So, I've got the installation CD stuck inside this .iso file, and a box
>to install, and no way to mount the .iso file onto the EFS filesystem.

If you have a 650 MB disk partition somewhere, you might be able to 'dd' 
the iso image to the partition and then mount the partition as if it's a 
CD. I believe I did this once upon a time, many moons ago. But then again, 
maybe I tried it and it didn't work... ;)

--Adam