[rescue] Hardware fingerprinting on Ultra 5/10?

[Steve Pacenka]

On Fri, 2005-08-26 at 16:32 +0000, jjhartley at att.net wrote:

> Given yesterday's discussion (and having a 160GB IDE drive lying
> about...), I'd like replace the 9GB factory drive with this larger
> one.  What do I need to do to get it configured correctly?  I've heard
> that Sun fingerprints hardware, so do I need to do anything in
> particular after installing this 160GB drive (and a CD-R drive to
> replace the CD-ROM drive...) in order to boot from the larger drive?
> Ultimately I want to put OpenBSD on this box and am unclear on how
> much information is fundamentally needed by OpenBoot and how much was
> simply needed by Solaris.

I've had no problems getting Sun disk labels onto several hard drives in
the 60-120G range, using partitioners that are part of Debian Linux.
I've had to set the drive characteristics manually in the label.  A 120G
drive has its label set for 255 heads, 63 sectors, and 14593 cylinders,
all of which are different from the actual physical values, but they
work okay.  I'll guess that you could go up to 255/63/16383, which would
allow addressing 134,754,762,240 bytes.

I've used a couple of generic CD-ROM and CD-RW drives in u5/10 boxes,
without any problem booting a Linux installer CD and using the drive's
data capabilities afterward.

===
Returning to an earlier topic, some people were imagining putting
several hard drives into a U5.  I would worry about peak power
consumption at initial spin-up and about airflow around the drives.  A
U10 would be a better choice when more than one hard drive will be used.

-- SP