[rescue] Sun Enterprise 3500 Wont Boot Solaris

[Mike Spooner]

> On 09/19/2017 06:37 PM, PhreakShow Telephone Company wrote:
> Im kind of at a loss with this thing
>
> Solaris 10 gives me an error that says short disk read the file just
> loaded does not appear to be executable.
>
> Solaris 9 does the same thing
>
Any ideas?
>

On older Solaris releases, "short read" errors can indicate trying to boot
off the wrong "soft partition"
of the CD/DVD. Not sure if that still applies to Solaris 10 ie: do the S10
DVDs still use a "pretend HDD" layout? If so, trying the following
alternative boot commands, one at a time, may help:

      ok boot cdrom:a
      ok boot cdrom:b
      ok boot cdrom:c
      ok boot cdrom:d
      ok boot cdrom:e
      ok boot cdrom:f
      ok boot cdrom:g
      ok boot cdrom:h

If that does not get you going, it would be worth checking that the NVRAM
settings (device-aliases etc) haven't been messed with by previous owner:
posting the output of the OpenBOOT "devalias" command to this list might be
useful.

The other thing to watch out for on the EXX00 systems is the DVD drive
itself - some of the Toshiba SCSI DVD drives shipped by Sun with the EXX00
systems are incapable of *booting* from DVD media more than 3.5Gb full,
allegedly due to firmware bugs in the drive. I can't remember which
specific Toshiba models were effected, but a net-search will probably
reveal it.

I too have had occasional problems with home-burned Solaris 9 and 10 DVD
discs (which I have not had with other Solarii, going all the way back to
the Solaris 2.2 CDs). Oddly, only the SPARC edition seems troublesome. Burn
at slowest speed your writer can manage (yes, 1X if possible), and use the
highest quality media you can reasonably afford, and if the first doesn't
fly, burn another one.

Best of luck,
-- Mike Spooner