UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

For the past ten years I have owned a blade 100, and I had Solaris 9 running on it.
Due to the fact, 9 is woefully out of date, I wanted to try 10, but 10 needed more ram, so I beefed up the ram to the full 2 gig. I have two 15 gig ide drives in the box (stock drives). But unfortunately solaris 10 requires a dvd for the install media, something the blade 100 does not have, it only has the cdrom. So I thought I would look around for other sparc64 compatible OS, and since I like OpenSuse, I thought I would try Debian 6.03, since it supports sparc64, but after repeated attempts, I never got the Rage XL video to work with Debian. Frustrated, I decided to go back to Solaris 9, but the install always fails on the newfs part; the drives no longer will format Solaris UFS; are there drive partition tables which I deleted by accident? In the meanwhile, I have tried OpenBSD for sparc64 and it has no problems formatting, installing, and running video, but I am unenthused with the OpenBSD community, just a wee bit overzealous for my taste, having been flamed many times for appearing too ignorant. This begs the question once again, how do I reformat the system back to Solaris 9? I would want to make one disk 100% /export/home and the other disk the system disk. How to do it? Honestly newfs fails everytime, but Debian 6.03, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD all format the drives easily and consistently, but I somewhat miss the good ol Solaris! How to set it back up? Any help is appreciated.

Richard

I guess you probably switch the disk label from a SMI to EFI one with your BSD experiments. You need to switch it back to SMI with "format -e" command.

Also, instead of Solaris 9 which is quite outdated, you might want to try installing the latest OpenSolaris release (textinstall-134-sparc.iso from Index of /isos/opensolaris) on that box. It fits on a CD so doesn't require a DVD.

Thanks very much for your help! I will investigate this further and I will try out the opensolaris build you referenced.

Richard