I'm starting a project to replace the boot drive on my Sparc 10 Ultra running Solaris 10. Apparently, to do this I will need to boot from cdrom after installing the new drive. I went to the Orcale download site but they only have a DVD ISO for Solaris 10. Unfortunately, my machine only has a CD drive. I do have a Solaris 9 CD that was parked in the drive when I got this machine, but no Solaris 10. So my questions are:
Is the Solaris 10 CD ISO still available anywhere? There's lots of results for this on the web but they all point to sun.com which no longer exists.
I assume there's no way to convert the DVD ISO to a CD, if for no other reason than that it's 2.16 GB and wouldn't fit on a CD. True?
How hard would it be to replace my CD drive with a DVD drive? If this is going to turn into another two-week long nightmare like I got when trying to add that blasted PGX32 vid card, then forget it.
Any advice on how to proceed would be most appreciated.
That's an idea I hadn't thought of I've got VirtualBox running on my PC on the same LAN, so it shouldn't be too hard to make a Solaris 10 VM using the ISO file I downloaded from Oracle.
So then I could just do a "boot from network"?
---------- Post updated at 04:18 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:15 PM ----------
Hmm, well I downloaded what I thought was the iso file but instead got something called "solaris10 (blah blah) .torrent". It never asked me to sign up for anything but now I'm not sure what to do with this "torrent" file. I'm afraid if I click on it I'll end up with some sort of virus.
If the file is suspicious don't do anything with it.
I'm fairly sure that I've got images of the CD's you want but I'm off-base and won't have access to my own archive for a day or two. Do you have a server (ftp?) I could upload to?
If you would like to pursue this option then send me a PM with ipaddress/userid/password and I'll see what I can do.
It shouldn't be that hard to replace the CD drive with a DVD drive, as long as it isn't a SCSI CD drive. I'm not sure I've ever seen a SCSI DVD drive....
OK, that's good to know. I did find one mention last night that just about any DVD drive should be a simple drop-in replacement. I've got an IDE drive sitting in my old PC so I'll try swapping that in.
---------- Post updated at 12:58 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:44 PM ----------
Well I've hit a dead-end with this method. When I tried to boot a Solaris 10 VM in VirtualBox using the DVD iso file I downloaded from Oracle, I got an error "can't find boot device". I was able to get a Solaris 10 VM running by installing the Solaris 10 .ova file from Oracle, but that installs an x86 Solaris and I read somewhere that you can't use an x86 network boot server to boot a Sparc machine so that's not going to help. Bummer.
I do (installing Solaris sparc from x86 notebook) that all the time as part of my job and i can tell you, it works. You'll need the sparc version of solaris on your install server and there should not be any problem...
Torrents are simply a file distribution method. You need a bit torrent client. Load the .torrent file you downloaded from the other site and your download should start.
Oh! Well then I guess, as Humphrey Bogart said in Casablanca, "I was misinformed". I'd still like to get a copy of Solaris 10 on CD in case the network boot server (which I have yet to figure out how to make) doesn't work.