Hi All,
Please help me with this.
My plan is to create an ISO image of my current solaris 8 OS.Because we use a stripped out version of solaris 8 which is different than the standard one in CD. Will dd command will do ?
My idea is to create a VMware image from iso file and play it in VMware player.
Can you please advise
Thanks in Advance.
If I remember correctly...
dd if=/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 of=/path-to/image.iso
...making sure the 'of' is not on the same disk as 'if'.
That wouldn't be an ISO image but a raw UFS one. Have a look at mkisofs for creating ISOs.
You're right. I was thinking of /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 as being a CD, not a HDD.
mkisofs is the way to go but read the documentation fully and carefully. There are a ton of options that you may or may not need which will mean the difference between a working ISO or huge unusable file.
Then I guess there was no reason to warn against writing a file to it given the fact it's a read-only filesystem 
Sounds like making a flash archive/image would be simpler (as can be used for JumpStarting a machine) in which case you could run:
# cd /var/tmp
# flarcreate -n <imagename> -c -e <imagename> <imagename>
You would end up with a flar file fn the machine excluding the contents of /tmp and /var/tmp called <imagename>.
If you then use the flar split command on the flar file you will have a cpio format file of the machines filesystems.
Hope this might be a helpful alternative?
If not here is a useful document on Sun's site about writing CD's and making ISO files:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-3814/6mjcp0qlh?l=en&a=view
# mkisofs -r -o image.iso <file or directory> . . . <file or directory>
Total translation table size: 0
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 247
Total directory bytes: 0
Path table size(bytes): 10
Max brk space used a000
176 extents written (0 MB)