Boot from CDROM and Access Server Tape Drive

[Michael42]

How can I boot from my workstation using the Sun Install CDROM and access a server's tape drive?

I want to do this to do a restore (mentioned in a previous post). I am not sure how to initialize the minimum network settings to achieve this.

The base problem is my tape drive is not attached to my local system.

Thanks all, Michael

 

[Annihilannic]

Presuming there's support for your network card on the CD-ROM (and there should be!) you should be able to manually plumb a network interface using:

[tt]ifconfig device plumb ip.address netmask netmask up
route add default gateway[/tt] (if necessary)

Then you should have enough network access to do the restores. Annihilannic.

 

[Michael42]

Can you help me a bit with the syntax for ifconfig:

Device: eri0
ip: 158.147.186.207
mask: 255.255.255.0

Does this look right?
ifconfig eri0 plumb 158.147.186.207 255.255.255.0 up

Michael

 

[pixboy]

Close. This should do it:

ifconfig eri0 plumb 158.147.186.207 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 158.147.186.255 up

(Not really sure if the "broadcast" statement is really needed, but it's there anyway.)

 

[BigDaddy21]

I am working a SUN ULTRA 60 and I can't boot from the cdrom via the boot cdrom command. The message is "can't open boot device". I have attempted to unalias and devalias the cdrom to attempt to get it going but no luck. Any suggestions????????

 

[SamBones]

From the "ok" prompt, type a "probe-scsi" or "probe-scsi-all" command and find the device for the cdrom. Then do a "devalias cdrom" command to find out what the device alias for cdrom is. If they're different, you can boot without using the device alias. Use the path instead. That would be something like...

[tt]boot /sbus/SUNW,fas@e,8800000/sd@6,0:d[/tt]

You can also change the devalias if it looks wrong. The Sun FAQs should help.

If the probe-scsi shows any kind of errors, you might do a "test scsi". Maybe your scsi card is bad.

 

[SamBones]

More good info here...

http://www.adminschoice.com/docs/booting__problems_in_solaris.htm

 

[BigDaddy21]

SAMBONES, Thanks for the help. I can now boot the disks but When I try to format the hard disk I get Fatal Errors and the Solaris recognizes the type of hard disk until I attempt to format. The format fails due to grown defects, upon attempting to repair a response is given "cannot repair theis is an unformatted drive" if I attempt to continue with known grown defects I get SCSI Transport errors and fatal errors on the CD ROM and must reboot. The machine then doesn't recognize the drives upon an attempt at reformatting.

 

[SamBones]

Are you sure the drives are good? It kinda sounds like you've got a bad drive and you may be wasting your time. Keep in mind that SCSI is a bus architecture so any bad device can make that whole channel look bad. That is, one bad device can make them all look bad.

If this is a new disk for this system, I would first confirm that you've got a drive that's compatable with the system. Not all SCSI devices are compatible. docs.sun.com should have detailed info on your system. The manufacturer should have detail on the drive.

Second, I would try yanking all hard drives and just booting to the CD. It may gripe about no device to install to, but it should still come up without giving complaints about the CD drive.

If you have another system, you can try putting the drive in question into it as a second drive, and then do a "format" to maybe repartition and do a surface test and build a good defect list. Then put it back into the system you're trying to install it in and run through the whole install again.

You could also have a bad SCSI controller. After all, the controller is a peer device on the SCSI bus. Bad cable maybe?

It just sounds like a hardware problem now. You are successfully booting to the CD, but as soon as you start accessing that device, the universe colapses.