Solaris

I got the i stall media from a torrent which i then verified from a md5 hash that i got from oracles website, and i did burn it to a dvdrom. I would like to update the prom regardless of whether its responsible for the failure of the solaris install or not

and if we are only root when in single user mode, that confirms that fact that the ramdisk is indeed read-only

i will burn another disk and see if this changes anything

It seems to me that when I booted the install cd I was able to edit a few files like /etc/hosts. I think this because they were symlinks to someplace (/tmp maybe) that was writable.

certain things are writeable, like the "/a" directory and "/mnt" but the one that count for the update seem to be read only

Yes, if you've mounted your hard disk filesystem under /a then it will be writable/editable. Similarly, if you mount writable media under /mnt then that will be writable too.

I'm really not understanding your situation here I think.

You've downloaded a firmware update and unzipped it. Did you do that on this Sparc box or elsewhere?

Anyway, what/where is that update now? On what media?

Provided you can read that then you should be able to flash it into the SC.

How did you get on with trying another Solaris CD?

Another idea is that if you suspect that the 10u9 you have is too late for the OBP, can you get a prior Solaris version to see if that will install?
Then you could update your firmware with that, and then install 10u9.

i have solaris 10 update 8 not 9

and yes while the flash drive will be writable the locations that prom update tool needs to use will no as they reside on the ramdisk file system. Below is the output of the update tool which was run from the flash drive but is executing on a single user filesystem running from cdrom

Code:

# ./unix.flash-update.S*

Flash Update 2.4: Program and system initialization in progress...

Could not find a writable driver location;
/kernel/drv
/platform/sun4u/kernel/drv
(Be sure the program is run as root.)

The flash PROM update was not successful.

i unzipped the file on my windows pc and transferd the files to a usb stick which i then mounted on the single user mode ram disk file system

i do also have a Solaris 9 carom but when i run the install it crashes halfway through, that one i believe the disk is scratched, im going look online for a download of solaris 9 that i can then burn

maybe its an issue with the cdrom drive, i tried sol 10-u11 and i got stuck at 50 % again

Could anyone step me thought how to do a network boot/install i tried messing around abit but i keep getting stuck

and when it gets stuck at 50% the cdrom activity light is solid

You'll find tons of stuff about how to setup and use an install server... Just try google first. If you run into problems, report back and we'll try to help!