Sun SPARCstation 2

From: healyzh_at_aracnet.com <(healyzh_at_aracnet.com)>
Date: Wed Feb 14 15:31:30 2001

> Thanks all.
>
> Looks like we'll see if we can do a BSD install. Biggest problem so
> far seems to be the 'virgin' drive. Gotta find a floppy disk sized
> formatter for it.
>
> Still open to suggestion!
>
> Jim

I just thought of something that will make the install a lot easier if
you've got an existing UNIX box, a CD-burner, and a CD-ROM that does
512-byte blocks. I used this to make a bootable CD-ROM for my SparcBook 3GS
(I toasted the Solaris 2.5.1 that was on it by installing Sun's Y2K
patches).

I used the following proceedure on my Sparc 20/712 running Solaris 2.6 and
then copied the resulting image over to my Mac and burned it to CD-R.
Worked great once I figured out how to boot it. Beware, the OpenBSD utility
for setting up your disk is a royal pain.

If you don't have the hardware/software to do this, you can also make a boot
floppy or dd miniroot28.fs (I think that's the right one) to a second HD.

                        Zane



Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.openbsd.misc

OpenBSD Bootable Sparc CD-ROM How-To

Many thanks are owed to the authors of mksunbootcd and the NetBSD Bootable
CD-ROM HOWTO. (http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/bootcd.html#sparcimage)


Step 1.

Create an ISO out of the files you wish to include on the CD. The first
disc I made was 79MB and included just the base packages, ports.tar.gz and
some readme files. There is plenty of room to add 150MB of sparc packages,
source tar balls, etc.

mkisofs -o ~/obsd28sparc.iso -T -a -l -J -r -L \
 -V "OpenBSD2.8_sparc" /mnt/cdrom/2.8/sparc

Check the man page for mkisofs to see what all the switches do. For me it
was important to select a couple of options so the disc would show up
properly under Win2k; translation tables (-T) for lower case file names
and a volume ID (-V).

In case you're using an OS that doesn't already have mkisofs, it can be
retrieved here: ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/cdrecord/mkisofs/


Step 2.

Retrieve a bootable floppy image of OpenBSD. At the time of this writing I
used ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/2.8/sparc/floppy28.fs.


Step 3.

Compile and install mksunbootcd. This tool will allow you to append a sun
disklabel and OpenBSD boot image to the ISO.

You can find mksunbootcd here:
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/mksunbootcd/

Step 4.

Create the final ISO. I used the following command:
mksunbootcd obsd28sparc.iso floppy28.fs floppy28.fs floppy28.fs

If you happen to have different boot images for sun4, sun4c, and sun4m
architectures, you might use a command like this:
mksunbootcd obsd28sparc.iso obsd-sun4.fs obsd-sun4c.fs obsd-sun4m.fs

Be sure not to run this command more than once since it rewrites the ISO
file. Once you have burned the ISO to a CD you should be able to run 'boot
cdrom'. See the current INSTALL.sparc file for equivalent commands with
different OpenBoot versions.


Step 5.

Contribute to the OpenBSD project. Every six months I try to buy at least
one copy of the official CD-ROM and usually go crazy with t-shirt
purchases. See http://www.openbsd.org/orders.html for more info.
Received on Wed Feb 14 2001 - 15:31:30 GMT

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