Create a Solaris Jumpstart from iso

Tips and Tutorials
1

The Solaris 9 and later CD ISO images are laid out differently than previous versions of the ISO images for Solaris.

If you just want to build a jumpstart and can afford the bandwidth to do so, download the Solaris DVD and use that instead. You don't need to do any of this with the DVD iso.

To set up a JumpStart server using the Solaris 9 OS and later CD-ROMs, you must have access to both slice 0 and slice 1 on the CDs. If you try to use an ISO image that is loopback mounted using the "lofi" driver it cannot recognize that slice 1 exists and, cannot access it.

To fix the problem, split the contents of slice 1 into it's own image file and then mount this image separately using lofi.

The following procedure describes how to do this.

# ls -l sol-9*
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     576364544 Jan  1 11:16 sol-9-u1-sparc-v1.iso
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     291962880 Jan  1 21:42 sol-9-u1-sparc-v2.iso

This only applies to CD 1, all other isos can be mounted using lofiadm in the normal way.

(1) Get a copy of the VTOC from the ISO image:

# dd if=sol-9-u1-sparc-v1.iso of=vtoc bs=512 count=1

1+0 records in
1+0 records out

(2) Now find out where Slice 1 starts in the image and how long it is. The starting cylinder for slice 1 is located at offset 452 (decimal) into the VTOC; the length in blocks is at offset 456, with both being 4 bytes long.

# od -D -j 452 -N 8 < vtoc
0000000 0000000888 0000546560
0000010

Slice 1 starts on cylinder 888, and is 546,560 blocks long. CD for the Solaris OS always have 640 blocks per cylinder, so you can find the starting block of slice 1 as follows:

# echo 888*640 | bc
568320

So now you know s1 starts at block 568320 and is 546560 blocks long.

(3) Copy slice one into a separate file:

# dd if=sol-9-u1-sparc-v1.iso of=sol-9-u1-sparc-v1-s1.iso bs=512 skip=568320 count=546560

546560+0 records in
546560+0 records out

(4) Mount both slice 0 and slice 1 as follows:

# mkdir /cd
# mkdir /cd/s0
# mkdir /cd/s1
# lofiadm -a /path_to/sol-9-u1-sparc-v1.iso
/dev/lofi/1
# lofiadm -a /path_to/sol-9-u1-sparc-v1-s1.iso
/dev/lofi/2

When you mount slice 1, remember that it is a UFS partition, not HSFS as is usual on a CD-ROM:

# mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /cd/s0
# mount -F ufs -o ro /dev/lofi/2 /cd/s1
# cd /cd/s0/Solaris_9/Tools/
# ./setup_install_server  /destination_dir
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