how do I create a Solaris x86 2.6 installation CD with my software on it?

how do I create a Solaris x86 2.6 installation CD with my software on it?

Post by Jim Reit » Fri, 06 Nov 1998 04:00:00



We have many Solaris x86 2.6 systems that we support and produce software
for.  We want to distribute a bootable floppy and a single CD that will let
the user of the system do a quick automatic install by copying file system
images off of the CD onto the systems hard disk.

To that end, we have tried to make a new Solaris 2.6 x86 installation CD
that contains our software in addition to Sun's supplied software.

We have been able to create a CD with slices that have UFS file systems, and
those file systems can be mounted manually, or by the volume manager with no
problems what-so-ever.

The problem:  The darn Solaris x86 boot floppy always fails to mount our
root file system (slice 0).  I don't know why.  It can be mounted fine under
a system already running Solaris.

Things we've discovered:
first 512 bytes on the cd:  mboot
2nd 512 bytes on the cd:  pboot
3rd 512 bytes on the cd:  disk label as defined by dklabel.h
4th 512 bytes on the cd:  all zeros

We can successfully modify the VTOC in the disk label without any problems.
It seems as if the boot floppy (boot.bin) is ignoring the VTOC when it trys
to mount the root file system on the CD after you choose the CD device to
boot from.  Our CD doesn't have an HSFS file system as slice1 as the
original Solaris x86 2.6 CD does, but this shouldn't matter when mounting
the root file system.

To burn the CD, we create an image file using the same first 4 sectors of
the CD as Sun used (although we modify the VTOC in the disk label), and then
we use Gear software to write the "foreign image" to the CD.  We have
adjusted the size of the overlap slice (slice 2) to be the entire part of
the CD that we make use of starting with sector 0.

If anyone has any ideas why the Solaris boot floppy can't mount our root
file system, please let me know (via email to please).

The error message that boot.bin gives us is something like:
"boot: source: /etc/bootrc failed to open"

I believe the reason it is failing to open /etc/bootrc is because it failed
to mount the root file system on the CD.

thanks...

Jim Reitz

 
 
 

1. can't read Solaris 2.6 x86 hard disk on Solaris 2.6 Ultra-1 ?!?

I was going to use this hard drive to move large files from my
Ultra to my Pentium PC for CD-R backup, but upon "boot -r" on
the Ultra I saw an error about "invalid geometry" on sd3, the
drive I had formatted on my PC to be ufs.  And now of course
I can't even "prtvtoc" this disk ("Unable to read Disk geometry"),
so mounting it is seemingly out of the question.

What's the problem?  Was I naive to assume the a ufs on a Solaris
system would be the same regardless of CPU type?  I really don't
want to use Ethernet to transmit potentially gigabytes of data
on a regular basis :-(...

Please reply via email (and post here, of course), as I don't
get a chance to keep up with the newsgroup as regularly as I
would wish.  Thanks.

--
--
Mark J. Kaufman             Sun Microsystems, San Diego

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