[SPARCbook] 3gx drive upgrade

[Mike Parson]

The 1.2gig drive that my 3gx came with was never really enough
space for a decent install of Sol 2.6 and the extra packages that
make it a useful system, so I finally broke down and bought one
of the 2.5" ide->scsi converters from California Drives:

http://www.caldrives.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=Caldrives&Product_Code=CHB25-INT

$150.

I had a 20gig drive that I'd bought for an external USB enclosure,
but I could never get Solaris to recognize the PCMCIA interface
card, so I pulled the drive back out for this project.

The install was pretty straight forward, while there were no docs,
it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which end you
plugged into what.  With the board attached, it made the low-profile
IBM EIDE drive about the same height as the SCSI drive that was
removed.

Since Tadpole's ftp site has been down for a while, a reinstall of
2.6 was out of the question, so I backed up the filesystems with
ufsdump to my linux box and installed the new drive.

I booted the system from an external CDROM using the 2.6 install
CD, single-user.  The only glitch was that format(1M) could not
write the disklabel.  I shutdown and did a net-boot of NetBSD,
which was able to label the disk, then reboot Solaris, which was
now able to label and slice.

Newfs the slices, nfs mount the Linux box, restore the dumpsets,
installboot, bing! 20 gig!

Any word on when Tadpole is gonna get their ftp site back up?

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org