[rescue] SparcU5 questions

[Mike Parson]

On Sun, Apr 11, 2004 at 02:21:51PM +0300, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
> The hard drive on my U5 just went belly up. :-( teach me to use those
> cheap chinese IBM drives. 
> 
> I have a question about CD drives to go into it. I have a tar file of the
> system on a linux machine that I can use to rebuild it.
> 
> The file is too big to fit one a CD and would have to be split. The other
> option I have is to replace the IDE CD drive with an IDE DVD drive.
> 
> I have one that is both a CD-writer and DVD reader. Can I replace the
> Goldstar drive in the U5 with it. Will it read/boot Solaris 9 CD's?
> 
> Is there any software to write CD's on an IDE burner that runs on the
> U5 under Solaris 9?
> 
> Can I just boot from the Solaris 9 CD and mount the linux machine via NFS?

You can do this, I've done it before, at least with Sol 2.6 and 7, boot
from the CD, get networking up, nfs mount the linux box, restore from
backup files.  I use usfdump/ufsrestore rather than tar, device files,
other special files, might not get backed-up properly with tar.

In fact, I'm getting ready to do it again on my Sparcbook, restore my
Solaris 2.6 install after playing with OpenBSD (and not liking it as
much, not enough of the HW supported yet).

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org