[Sunhelp] odd solaris installation warning and behaviour

[David Hansen]

 I came across an odd incident last night that I hadn't seen before and want
to know if anyone can come up with a plausible theory on "why" it even 
happened. So here goes:

 I went to install Solaris 2.5.1 onto an Ultra-5/360 with an 8GB EIDE drive
and 256MB of ram. The disk layout was:
	4GB /export/home
	2GB /usr
	1GB /tmp (swap)
	1GB /	(/var falls under here intentionally)

 The package installation went through just fine, followed by the patch
analyzation and installation and then an odd warning came up in the cmdtool
console window which read "Some text has been lost in a cmdtool transcript 
because the max edit log size has been exceeded". At this point the machine
went completely idle (no disk access, cdrom, etc...) but was still responsive
(could open up new terms, basically still "useable") and remained this way
for about 20 minutes until I rebooted it and restarted the installation 
procedure from scratch in the hopes that the second time around this 
mysterious little error wouldn't appear again. But that just wasn't my luck,
it happened again in the same spot. At this point I left it sitting there 
while I scoured every resource I could come across trying to find _some_
reference to this message and behaviour. I probably spent about 20-30 minutes
searching for a glimmer of hope when I heard a click sound from the machine
and turned to see that it had come back to life and was rebooting as if it
had never entered into its little coma. It came back up with the fully 
installed OS and no error messages (and since it was almost midnight at this
point (I had a late start), I just completed the setup and let it go for later
investigation.
 Does anyone have any idea why this happened and why the machine would go
completely idle for such a long time period and then just pop right back into
action as if nothing had happened? From the disk layout I don't see why it
should have ever thought that any filesystem ran out of room. And I've done
2.5 and 2.5.1 and up installations with distinct /var filesystems with much
less space than what it would have had to deal with in this situations layout
without any problems before. Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful that it
came back...but I don't like walking away from unexplained behaviour on my
machines. And from my searches, talking to friends and to Sun's tech support
I cannot find anyone that knows what caused this or even why it came back to 
life after such an extended period of time.