[SunRescue] Moving system disk between machines

[Chris Powell]

All,

I have a Solaris 7 system disk in a SPARCstation IPC which I want
to move to a SPARCstation 10 (hey, I might get usable performance
now!). I want to do this without re-installing Solaris.

I initially thought this would be simple as the SunOS 5.7 kernel is
generic between kernel architectures (sun4c, sun4m etc.). Not so as
the boot program in /platform is only present for the kernel
architecture of the machine it installed was originally on (i.e.
my disc has sun4c present for the IPC, but lacks sun4m for the
SS10). Easily solved, boot from CD and copy the /platform/sun4m
stuff from CD to the system disk. Then I realised all the /devices
entries are wrong! I'm getting errors about keyboard not present
when booting now - I guess I need to boot from CD again and run
drvconfig using the -r rootdir option.

Is there a simple step-by-step way to move systems discs between
architectures, or even machines? I guess if I move the system disc
to a different sun4m machine (e.g. a SS5) all the device entries
will be wrong again - iommu at obio 0xe0000000 on the SS10,
at obio 0x10000000 on the SS5.

It actually seems more difficult to do this with SunOS 5.x than it
was with SunOS 4.x.

Thanks for any help.


Chris.