SUMMARY: Bootable Solaris 2.3 tape

From: Lisa Zenobi (lisa@fci.COM)
Date: Mon Jul 11 1994 - 21:00:19 CDT


Original Question:

< Does anyone know how to make a bootable tape for Solaris 2.3? I know how
< it is done with Solaris 1.x but being that they changed the whole file
< structure in 2.x I'm not sure how it is done.

Summary:

Well I didn't get anyone who could give me a way to make a bootable tape from
Solaris 2.3 but I got several people who wanted to know how to make a bootable
tape from Solaris 1.x.

There are a few ways to do this. If you already have a bootable tape then
the attachments are how to copy the tape in bootable form. The second way
is what I got out of sun-managers just a while ago. Haven't tried it myself
but I know of people that have and it works.

1st way: Read the bootable tape onto disk and then write it back out
on to tape....

[read_tape]

        mt -f /dev/rst2 rewind
count=1
while true
do
        dd if=/dev/nrst2 bs=64k of=/mnt/file.$count
        if [ $? != "0" ]
        then
                exit
        fi
        count=`expr $count + 1`
done

[write_tape]

        mt -f /dev/rst2 rewind
cd /mnt
files="`ls -1 file.? | sort` "
files=$files" `ls -1 file.?? | sort`"
for i in $files
do
  echo $i
  dd if=$i bs=64k of=/dev/nrst2
  if [ $? != "0" ]
    then
    exit
    fi
done

.................................................................

2nd way......

The key point in making a bootable tape are the files 'munix', 'XDRTOC'
and mini-root. You cannot take 'munix' and 'mini-root' from CD-ROM because
it's specified which device is used to install from in these files.

This is the layout of a bootable tape:

|--- MUNIX ---|--- XDRTOC ---|--- MINIROOT ---|--- REST OF O.S. -----

First of all you must have a boot-tape of a previous tape-release of SunOS
(e.g 4.1.1). Insert the Tape and do the following commands:

                mt -f /dev/nrst0 rew
                dd if=/dev/nrst0 of=tape.00 bs=512k
                dd if=/dev/nrst0 of=tape.01 bs=512k
                dd if=/dev/nrst0 of=tape.02 bs=512k

Don't worry about if these files are older - It doesn't matter because
they are only used to extract the system-packages. You won't have any
old SunOS-Parts if you install from the generated tape.

The file 'tape.01' contains an index about the packages on the tape and is
used when the install-procedure asks you which packages you want to install.You can get the index with the following command:

                /usr/etc/install/xdrtoc tape.01

        SunOS 4.1.2 704-2976-10 of Wed Oct 30 17:30:09 [...] Engineering
        ARCH sun4c
        
VOLUME 1
         Vol File Name Size Type
           1 0 munix 3022848 image
           1 1 XDRTOC 7112 toc
           1 2 mini-root 7168000 image
           1 3 root 253952 tarZ
           1 4 usr 12525025 tarZ
           1 5 Kvm 3017919 tarZ
        [...]
           1 28 Security 250129 tarZ
           1 29 OpenWindows_Programmers 4698861 tarZ
           1 30 Copyright 1124 image
 
Now you need to get the packages from the cd-rom in the same order listed inthe toc-file. I call the files tape.xx (where xx is the file-number from thetoc-file). On the CD's all the package-files are in normale tar-format but on
the tape the files are compressed. So you have to compress the files after
copying from the CD.
 
You'll now have a bunch of files labeled from tape.00 to tape.31.
 
Insert a new tape in your drive and copy the files to the tape:
 
                mt -f /dev/nrst0 rew
                dd if=tape.00 of=/dev/nrst0 bs=512k
                dd if=tape.01 of=/dev/nrst0 bs=512k
                [...]
                dd if=tape.30 of=/dev/nrst0 bs=512k
 
or use the following c-shell commands:
 
                mt -f /dev/nrst0 rew
                foreach i (tape.*)
                        dd if=$i of=/dev/nrst0 bs=512k
                end

This should do it for you.

Lisa Zenobi, Technical Support Engineer

FORCE Computers E-mail: lisa@fci.COM
2001 Logic Drive UUCP: fci!lisa@uunet.UU.NET
San Jose, CA 95124-3456
Phone: 408/369-6217 Fax: 408/371-3382



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:09:05 CDT