I'm new to solaris but am a certified systems administrator. I was recently brought the task of repairing a sunblade150 and was completely willing to take on this task without knowing the history behind this system. Apparently some slick S.O.B. from ebay bought this system, took the Solaris 9 installation disk and password protected root then sent it back saying he doesnt want it because its password protected. Ive been reading around and understand how to get to the OK prompt and use "boot -s cdrom" but everytime i try this i get nowhere but a password prompt. Ive seen that i can reset the root password with the install disk using the passwd command but this guy stole our disk (because about a year ago this OS was worth a lot of money) So i went to sun and downloaded the free solaris 10 and was planning on just reinstalling 10 because i need nothing off this hard disk, but im still confronted with a password prompt before i can continue to even try to install this OS. My only thought right now would be to install the HD as slave on a different computer and delete all partitions. (because i cant delete the partitions as is) But I'm not sure if this is the right answer. Does anyone have any other solutions out there?
Reset the programmable read only memory with no results. I then installed a new cdrom to see if maybe it wasnt reading correctly and continuing to boot from the hard disk, no luck. So i removed the hard disk and wiped it completely. Now i get an error message after using command "boot cdrom" of:
Boot device: /pci@1f,0/ide@d/cdrom@1,0:f File and args: grub
Bad magic number in disk label
Can't open disk label package
Cant open boot device
ok
I then checked the solaris 10 installation disk i downloaded for the proper files on another machine and everything seems to be there and burned properly.
using command probe-ide it says the cd-rom is recognized as Device 1 (hard disk is Device 0)
do i need to format prior to inserting any of the installation disks?
What am i doing wrong here?
I now have the proper service manual and went through every diagnostics i could and everything has passed. Thanks for that link!
show-disks from the OK prompt is pretty useful for this, it'll list most of the bootable disks on your system and the paths to them.
Alternatively, do a reset (or reset-all depending on the PROM version, whatever works) then probe-scsi-all. Do NOT run the probe without doing the reset, sun boxen are not all that good at handling a probe when there's junk in memory.
You are right, the probe-scsi wouldn't help you much (I'm not really used to ide systems )
The probe was only an alternative to the show-disks - you've got all you need already now, just issue a "boot /pci@1f,0/ide@d/cdrom -s" to come up off the cd.
You might also want to have a play with devalias, nvalias and nvunalias to set up a few useful device aliases (so you can go "boot cdrom" and such).
I have seen that bad magic number before. If i remember correctly you need to name the hard disk using the format command in another machine. once it is labeled it will accept the installation.
With a Solaris manual install, if it detects the harddrive is unformatted it will knock you down into a shell. From the shell you can use the format command to select the disk, low-level format and partition, then return back to the installation.
Sorry i just got back to work and am ready to finish this thing today, hopefully. Anyways I feel stupid now because i have been trying to install the x64/x86 version onto a sparc box. I didnt pay enough attention to the other downloads. I'm downloading now and I'll post back on how the install goes. Thank you all for your invaluable assistance. Maybe ill take this x86 home and install it on one of my pc's and play around with it!
The installation went great! Was very simple and straightforward. Now all i need to do is make sure i can connect to the internet. Is there a simple way to make sure all my peripherals are installed and recognized by the system? I skipped the network setup while installing and i shouldn't have but that just allows me to learn how to set the network up manually.
)