I just got a Sun solaris workstation from my friend but i don't know the password to his username. I have all the software but i dont know how to reinstall the operating system without logging in first. I dont need any of the info already on the system. Someone please help

Press
Stop+A on the keyboard.
Put in the CD
The spaces on either side of the '-' *are* required.

Ok I just tried that and it comes up with:

"Bad magic number in disk label"
"Can't open disk label package"

What does that mean and what should i do about that?

I am using the Solaris 9 DVD

Thanks in advance

The error means it is not able to read a disk. In this case since you are booting with the cdrom option, I'd guess it is the DVD. How old is the workstation? Stuff older than a Sun Blade 100 or 150 will probably not have a DVD drive, just a CD. Or if it is really old, Solaris 9 might be too new for it. Also, is the DVD version for Sparc or x86 hardware? They will not work with the incorrect hardware.

If neither of those is the problem (i.e. you have the right version and also have a DVD player) I would guess the DVD drive is bad.

I have a SunBlade 150 and have the same problem. I can read the cd's or dvd, but when I try to boot from cdrom I get the same message " can't open disk label package".

Is there any workaround to boot from cd? I bought a used 150 and it came running Solaris8 and has a 988mb root partition and I need to increase to size. I perfer to reinstall from cdrom and run Solaris 10.

Thanks

So just to confirm...

You have the set of 5 (or six) CDROMs with Solaris 10 on them?

You can get into open prom?

You can do "probe-scsi-all"?

You can do "boot cdrom"?

Try "set-defaults", "reset", then "boot cdrom".