Background:
I'm having an issue with booting a clone of hard drive with Solaris 8 installation.
For cloning process I have used g4l, running under click'n'clone option. As far as I know the actual operation ran behind g4l's interface was dd, though I do not have any information about the exact command that was ran (I presume it was common: dd /dev/sda /dev/sdb).
I have ran the Sun Blade 150 Workstation with Ultra-SPARC IIe 500MHz with the cloned drives (there were two drives on the original machine, and I have replaced them both with clones). Unfortunately it did not boot. There's a boot log, which passes quite fast until the machine restarts. Since I'm fairly new to the Unix OS overall, I have no idea how to stop the boot messages and read them, so any tips would be welcome.
The Problem:
As far as I have read so far, I've came to notice that I might need to restore bootblock using installboot command, from an Solaris 8 Install CD. The problem is that I do not own a copy of such disk. Therefore, I was wondering if you could provide me with a download location of some sort of a recovery disk for SunOS 5.8 or even the original installation disk.
If there's a cloning solution that does not require usage of the installation disk that would be highly appreciated too.
Thank you kind sir! Finally someone who took a note of my question! Besides those pesky warnings.
Nasir, I presume you want me to run that from a Solaris machine - and that's where my problem is! The machine I'm working on has cut out access and boots straight to application, so I can't gain root access (nor any other kind of access to the CLI/OS besides the application itself). I was hoping if there's a way to do it from another non Solaris machine, manually or howsoever. I thought of running an OpenSolaris 10 OS, but later I figured that OpenSolaris/Solaris 10 both use grub instead of the bootloader Solaris 8 had.
Although I am working on acquirement of the root password, so if I get a chance get root access, I'll give it a shot.
Imho. You clearly do not know what you are doing.
Suggest you review your backups with all speed and hire a professional.
If you cannot get all "root" passwords this is going to be a difficult job for the professional.
Basic advice. Do not type anything on the keyboard on this computer. Spend your time finding the Sales Order documents for the Server and Operating System and any media or documentation which might help the professional. Finding the media is very very important.
not sure where you got that dd command from. besides the incorrect syntax the device names are not Solaris.
if you really did use dd with the same model/drive parameters then this should have worked - however you would not really use this method on on a live system.
you can also boot over the network if you don't have the original media. you can download Solaris and create a boot server. There is plenty of documentation on how to do this.
can you freeze/lock the screen to prevent scrolling? a serial console could be handy to capture all of the messages.
Ok, let's get things straight. I -am- hired to do the job, though my employer didn't know it was out of my knowledge area (I'm particularly working with Linux), but I figured it's still a Unix OS so I'd give it a shot.
The dd command I wrote was just a manifestation, not the one I actually used. I actually used G4L (at first), on a -Linux- OS (previously I had the drives I'm cloning and new ones connected to it of course). Things didn't actually work (I think the empty media was damaged), until I took new drive and G4U which did the job and brought me to something like this: "boot disk: a ..." (I seriously cannot recall the whole openboot message, though I know it was the one that was written when startup with original disks succeeded).
Yeah, as a side note (@methyl), I am not the owner of the workstation. The owner however has no knowledge on how to use it, beside the usage of the particular medical application running on the machine. As far as I found out the machine was sold without any documentation just so the seller would remain the only one eligible for the service of the machine. I hope this makes it clear for you. There's no need of informing me about the importance of documentation/OS media.
@frank: Could you provide me with a download link? As far as I know Solaris 8 is not publicly available. And I'll try to get the messages if I get another glance at the machine, since the deadline is over and I gave up. Serial console? Any links to that device/software?
I am not familiar with Solaris for Intel/OpenSolaris but presumably you may boot up into single user mode by doing something at the grub stage (See Boot OpenSolaris into Single User Mode Mike Gerdts ) that will prevent it going straight into the application, you can then login as the root user and reinstate the boot block on the copy of the disc, otherwise boot off a Solaris disk exit to the # prompt rather than installing (or use a "Live" CD) and reinstate the boot block from there.
As I just wrote, the OP is running on SPARC so there is no GRUB involved. To boot in single user mode, type Stop-A to go to the openboot prompt then type
The mention of OpenSolaris (normally run on Intel/AMD processors) confused me.
Once you are logged on single user mode you can then install the boot block onto the cloned disk...
My apologies.
As I said I am not familiar with Solaris in particular so I decided not to fool around with the machine I'm working on, but decided to clone the drives on a separate (unfortunately x86) machine. At that point I presumed it's possible, but still I had no Intel Solaris 8 (nor sparc invariant, though that wouldn't change anything). That's where I *thought* of running OpenSolaris (again I say I am -not- familiar with solaris), until I figured it is meant for x86 and it was using grub. It was just a note of what I -tought- and -tried-, and it did -not- work, so yes, let's get back to the topic, shall we?
Other than that, the single user mode should be the thing I needed (though I would still need to use the machine I'm cloning, instead of doing the process on a separate machine as I originally intended), though it's too late now. Other than that, thanks, since I presume that might be just what I needed.