[rescue] ISO burning for Solaris booting

[Earl Baugh]

FYI -- On my V120 I'm still having issues getting ISOs to build a bootable
DVD.
Tried burning two different ways on my Mac and tried two different drives
in the machine.

No joy so far.   Following up on the Sun Enterprise 3500 thread about
having problems booting,
I'm wondering how others have gotten ISOs burnt that boot well.     I don't
have access to another
drive for the box... I do have two more DVD burners I'm going to try (but
those two require I get another
machine re-constructed and booting).

Does the size of the blank DVD matter?

I'm going to try Mike Spooner's suggestions (quoted below) but wanted to
get feedback, I'm assuming booting a V120 class machine from DVD isn't an
issue, correct?

Earl



On older Solaris releases, "short read" errors can indicate trying to boot
> off the wrong "soft partition"
> of the CD/DVD. Not sure if that still applies to Solaris 10 ie: do the S10
> DVDs still use a "pretend HDD" layout? If so, trying the following
> alternative boot commands, one at a time, may help:
>
>       ok boot cdrom:a
>       ok boot cdrom:b
>       ok boot cdrom:c
>       ok boot cdrom:d
>       ok boot cdrom:e
>       ok boot cdrom:f
>       ok boot cdrom:g
>       ok boot cdrom:h
>
> If that does not get you going, it would be worth checking that the NVRAM
> settings (device-aliases etc) haven't been messed with by previous owner:
> posting the output of the OpenBOOT "devalias" command to this list might be
> useful.
>
> The other thing to watch out for on the EXX00 systems is the DVD drive
> itself - some of the Toshiba SCSI DVD drives shipped by Sun with the EXX00
> systems are incapable of *booting* from DVD media more than 3.5Gb full,
> allegedly due to firmware bugs in the drive. I can't remember which
> specific Toshiba models were effected, but a net-search will probably
> reveal it.
>
> I too have had occasional problems with home-burned Solaris 9 and 10 DVD
> discs (which I have not had with other Solarii, going all the way back to
> the Solaris 2.2 CDs). Oddly, only the SPARC edition seems troublesome. Burn
> at slowest speed your writer can manage (yes, 1X if possible), and use the
> highest quality media you can reasonably afford, and if the first doesn't
> fly, burn another one.