[Suns-at-Home] Customized Sun Boot CD/DVD

[Sandwich Maker]

" From: Mike Pepe <lamune@doki-doki.net>
" 
" Charles Lindsey wrote:
" >> From: adh@an.bradford.ma.us (Sandwich Maker)
" >>
" >> " From: "Arthur J. Byrnes" <arthur@ajb.com>
" >> "
" >> "
" >> " I have been trying to build a customized Solaris Sparc boot cd and
" >> " dvd.  Actually, I wanted to make a LiveCD suck as Knopix, but that
" >> " seems like it will be a lot more work.  There seems to be a Solaris
" >> " LiveCD project, but its for pc, and its not very active.
" >> "
" >> " []
" >> "
" >> " But what does seem to be tough is burning the cd/dvd, since it seems
" >> " that Sun partitions the cd, or as the pc folks say, mult-tracks
" >> " it.  I can burn the iso's from Sun, but once I edit them on the pc,
" >> " they only burn as drink coasters...
" >> "
" >> " []
" >> "
" >> " So, finally, my question, do any of you fine folks know of an iso
" >> " editing program that can deal with the partitions/tracks?  MagicIso
" >> " and WinIso don't.
" >> "
" >>
" >> that's because the cd isn't a proper iso; it's actually formatted like
" >> a read-only hd, 512b block ufs.
" > 
" > But that can't be right. I downloaded Solaris 10 from Sun, which arrived 
" > as an ISO complete CD image. And I burnt it on a PC, and it worked.
" 
" Agreed. I've made copies of my original SunOS 4.1.1 CD onto CD-R, and 
" they work fine.

i burned the s2.6 that my old ss2 ran on a pc too.  that has nothing
to do with it.  it's a hd fs, wrapped in an iso.

it's kind of a hack, to allow booting from cds without having to
support iso9660 in openboot, and it long predates multisession.

" It's not that CD itself has 512 byte sectors, it's the Sun drives that 
" present the data in 512 byte sectors. (and we're talking about pretty 
" old drives, the openboot prom in anything newer than (probably) 1st 
" generation SPARC boxes should be able to boot off a CD-ROM drive that 
" doesn't support the 512 byte sector mode.

red herring.  openboot 3 on ultrasparc boxes supports booting from
cd/dvd not jumpered for 512b sectors because it issues the blocksize
mode switch command when booting.

many old drives -do-not- support a 512b/s mode and cannot be used for
booting suns, and for pre-ultras 512 must be the default mode.

try doing a fstyp and a prtvtoc on your sunos 4.1.1 or solaris 10 cds.
read up also on cdrecord, which has long included the mojo for making
bootable sun cds.  you can also find info in mike frisch's cdrom faq
at sunhelp.org/faqs; a pointer to making bootable cds is under
miscellaneous.
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
adh@an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought