[SunRescue] OT: Irix installation on bare machine

[Christopher Byrne]

Well, that horrible screeching sound wasn't my wife telling me to take out
the trash afterall, it was the drive on one of my O2's happily shredding
it's bearings into itty bitty pieces. You know it's bad when you pull the
drive out of the machine and it's too hot to touch right ;-)

Anyway I got a new 9.1 gig Ultra160 SCA2 drive from the guy who sold me the
O2 originally, and now I need to reinstall Irix. One small problem, I have
never done this on a bare disk drive before. I've done an upgrade though so
I figure, how hard can it be. Never think that folks, it brings the wrath of
the computing gods down upon your head.

I read the getting started guide, and peruse the online docs, and hey,
other than the docs being extremely vague it seems like it shouldn't be too
hard.... except for one small problem. None of the documentation has the
remotest connection to reality.

It seems that the only way to do a bare install involves selecting every
package on my 15 disk set by hand, inserting all of the CD's one at a time,
and resolving every conflict and dependency issue manually, one at a time.
Ok... I thouhgt to myself "I can do that, how many packages and dependencies
can there be?". Whoa unto me the moron who mocs the computing gods twice in
one night. Anyway to make a long story even longer I gave up after about an
hour of "conflict resolution".

Can anyone help me here? The machine is an 02, one disk, 128megs RAM, Irix
6.5 with overlays.

Thanks,
Chris Byrne