Re: Booting a sparc10

[Heikki Vatiainen <hessu@cs.tut.fi>]

> > I agree, but isn't it "Sun disk label"? At least that is what I
> > have on my SS20:
> > 
> > huilu:~# fdisk -l
> > 
> > Disk /dev/sda (Sun disk label): 14 heads, 72 sectors, 2036 cylinders
> > Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes
> > 
> >    Device Flag   Begin    Start      End   Blocks   Id  System
> > /dev/sda1            0        0     1400   705600   83  Linux native
> > /dev/sda2  u      1401     1401     1441    20160   83  Linux native
> > /dev/sda3            0        0     2036  1026144    5  Whole disk
> > /dev/sda4  u      1442     1442     2036   299376   82  Linux swap
>
> This is almost exactly what I needed, just one thing, how do I do a
> disklabel with fdisk?


If you are not afraid of experimenting, you could try what I did.
At one point when I was playing with installation I decided to
initialize the disk completely. I had a partial Debian installation
on it and to get a fresh start I did "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda",
let it run a while, interrupted it with ^C, run "sync", and then
Stop-A to get the system prom monitor prompt.

After that I did "boot net" to boot the rescue image over the net
and start a new installation. When it was time to create the
partitions, the disk had no label and, if I remember correctly, I
was prompted by fdisk for correct values. Since I was not sure
about them, I choose "auto configure" and accepted the defaults.

I just checked fdisk and looks like "s" command goes through the 
same dialog I am describing above. You might want to try that 
before doing the "dd" trick.

I also had to create the "Whole disk" partition by hand. I think 
Solaris does it automagically.

Maybe this helps. If it does not, I can add some disks to the box 
and make notes how it goes exactly. However, I can not do that 
over the net, so you will have to wait for tomorrow for that :)

// Heikki
-- 
Heikki Vatiainen                  * hessu@cs.tut.fi
Tampere University of Technology  * Tampere, Finland