Sunday, January 26, 2014

Booting sparc? You'll need to talk slower!

Recently, I found myself trying to install Solaris 10 on a Sun Blade 2500, with very little luck. I downloaded sol-10-u11-ga-sparc-dvd.iso, burnt it to DVD on my Linux box, then put the DVD in the sparc machine. Once the openboot PROM screen came up, I'd do this:

{0} ok boot cdrom
Boot device: /yadda/yadda/yadda:f File and args:
Can't read disk label.
Can't open disk label package
ERROR: boot-read fail

I tried almost everything: DVD-R and DVD+R media, a different (but similar model) IDE DVD drive, different IDE cables, different Sun Blade system, swearing and cursing... none of these things helped.

What worked was to burn the DVD at the slowest speed possible. I use K3B so I just set burn speed to 4x, booted from it, and hey presto! All working.


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