Following on from a previous post on installing Solaris on an emulated Spacrstation using QEMU, I’ve been attempting to install on a Sun Ultra 5 with a flakey cdrom drive, and wanted to step through the install steps first on an emulated machine (since the life of the used cdrom drive I picked up from ebay may be limited).
qemu-system-sparc -M SS-20 -m 128 -drive file=sparc_sol8_2.qcow2,bus=0,unit=0,media=disk -drive file=../solaris8_sparc_disk1.iso,bus=0,unit=1,media=cdrom,readonly=on
Adding -nographics option to the above command makes things little easier, since we don’t really need the graphical installer at this point, and this more closely mirrors what I’m seeing with my attempted install on the actual Ultra 5 which I’m installing over a text terminal connected to the serial port.
After reaching the openbios prompt, booting with boot cdrom:d -vs gets you to a Single User prompt where you can continue the required steps to format the disk first, before rebooting and continuing without the -vs option.
After boot:d :
Skipped a few steps, confirming network config.
This is the step I’m interested in using as a workaround for the flakey cdrom drive. Can I mount an NFS drive containing the content of the install cdrom and install from the network? (I’ve already gone down the path of trying to setup a jumpstart/netboot config and couldn’t get the machine to find a netboot host, so that din’t turn out to be a workable option) :
I couldn’t get this to connect to my NFS share on another Solaris 10 VM, so not sure this was as useful as I thought it might be, but I could continue and complete the install anyway.