Installing Solaris 8 x86 on VirtualBox 7.0.20 – when to remove the iso during install

After initially booting from disk 1 and following the prompts to format the disk, you’ll reach a prompt where it asks you to remove the install media and reboot. Note that it also says to only remove the media after the machine has reset before you eject- this is important otherwise the disk will not be bootable:

The sequence that appears to work is:

  • press Enter
  • wait for VM to reset
  • remove mounted iso in VirtualBox just as the VM is restarting and you see the VirtualBox logo/BIOS screen

At this point you’re asked what partition to boot from (select 1) and the installer will continue as normal from that point:

If you remove the iso from the VM before it resets, you’ll see the screen to select either the boot disk or the cdrom (the initial installer screen, not the partition selection screen above), and if you select the disk at this point it will not boot (after pressing Enter it appears there’s a few seconds delay where there is a disk sync step, and this needs to complete before the machine resets and when it’s safe to remove the iso).

Revisiting SunPCI driver install on Solaris 10

I’ve posted before on installing the SunPCI drivers on Solaris 10 but skipped a few steps. Sites to download the drivers are limited, but if you Google for the exact file name, you can find some locations, search for SUNWspci3.tar.Z

Unzip the file with:

uncompress *.Z

The untar with:

tar xf SUNWspci_13.tar

The SunPCI card in my Ultra60 is a 1.3 card, not 3, so be careful which package you download. Available options seem to be SUNWspci_13, SUNWspci2, SUNWspci3

Once you’ve untar’ed, run in the same folder:

pkgadd -d .

(not as I said before to cd into the untar’d folder). At this point you should be able to follow the rest of the steps in the previous post.

I’m reinstalling and setting up Solaris 10 on this box since I spent some time installing FreeBSD and then Solaris 8, and decided Solaris 10 was actually the better option, so I’m going that to that again (Solaris 8 I couldn’t get to install).

At some point I must have mounted a shared drive on my NAS to copy files to/from this box, so I’ll also take a look at getting that going again (I don’t think I took any notes), I could have used ftp. Will see what works.