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MacOS 10.15 Catalina fails to burn bootable cdroms from ISOs

Not likely to impact most people, but occasionally I use an external USB dvd burner to make bootable disks for installing various OSes on older computers.

Previously before Catalina I would right click an ISO and select “Burn Image to…’ and this would work as it has for the past several MacOS releases. Now though when I click this option the menu disappears and nothing happens. A tip here suggested to double click this iso to mount it, and then right click the mounted disk and select “Burn Image’. While this does work to burn to a blank cdrom, the disk is not bootable, it appears to only copy the files to the cdrom and not burn it as a bootable disk, even if the iso is from a bootable disk.

Reading through the above post on the Apple site, this sounds like a bug in Catalina and has been logged.

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Useful Sun OpenBoot Prom (OBP) commands

At power on: (useful reference)

Stop-A : stop the boot process, takes you to OBP ok prompt

Stop-N : reset to default NVRAM values

From go prompt (from article here):

  • to enable POST diags, not sent to monitor but sent via serial connection to a terminal or terminal emulator
setenv diag-switch? true

Turn off again with false

  • Turn off configured boot drive:
setenv auto-boot? false

true to enable again

  • Manually boot from given device:
boot disk
boot cdrom

where disk and cdrom are device aliases that you can view with

devalias

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Solaris 10 install on ESXi VM error: “ERROR: The disc you inserted is not a Solaris OS CD/DVD”

After going through all the setup options but before it gets to starting the actual install on an ESXi VM I get the error:

“ERROR: The disc you inserted is not a Solaris OS CD/DVD”

From this post here about the same error on a Dell server (I’m installing on a VM on an HP DL380 G7) with Solaris driver issues with ATAPI CD/DVD devices, I changed the virtual CD drive on my VM from SATA to IDE, and can now get past the error.

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For no particular reason, a Sparc workstation is on it’s way – part 2: it arrived!

It arrived a couple of days earlier than expected, ahead of the other multiple parts that I needed (keyboard, mouse, scsi disk etc).

It’s a bit grubby and scratched up, but not that bad for an older machine:

It’s incredibly heavy though, wow, it must way at least 60 pounds.

Inside looks like there is the Creator 3D graphics card, and a SunPCI card (more on that later).

I have a Sun5c keyboard and mouse, so plugging them in, attaching a monitor and powering on …. nothing.

Uh oh.

I started to go down the path of running the diags over the serial connection, and using my Atari ST as a terminal, but before I got to far with that I though I should check basics and make sure everything is well seated.

Turns out both cards were only half in their slots. One more try, but still nothing. Next, pulled the CPU board out and gave it a blow and then reinserted…. power on, fans running, diags run and we have a banner:

Next up, waiting until Monday for my SCSI disk to arrive with disk sled, and then we’ll start a Solaris install!

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